The Times: Digital Archive 1785-1985

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• Like to see how the headlines actually looked on the day?

• Searching for information about individual people?

• Interested in contemporary advertisments?

The Times Digital Archive captures 200 years of British social and political history from the London Times. The entire newspaper is captured, with all articles, advertisements and illustrations/photos divided into categories to facilitate searching. The archive does not include the Sunday Times.

Searching tips

There are four different searches available:

• by relevancy - where the results will be ordered according to the number of times the search term appears in the text
• by keyword
• browsing by date or
• by advanced search which allows you to select the field in which a word should appear

Most searches have very clear instructions on the page.

Tips

• Use the radio buttons to select to search only in titles, citations or abstracts OR anywhere in articles (including any text)
• Use standard Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT)
• Words can be truncated by using the wildcard *
• The search recognises full stops (eg. R.A.F.), hyphenated names, apostrophes and ampersands. Enter the search words both with and without these symbols to check all possibilities. Note: from the 1970s onwards, The Times did not use full stops in acronyms like RAF

Limiting a search

The main search page includes options to limit your search in several ways.

• By date

  Use any date formats, except ones that contain hyphens. For example:

  • August 16, 1999
  • 16 Aug 1999
  • 8/16/1999
  • 19990816

  Use range operators such as 'before' and 'since' to specify dates before or after the date you enter and the range operator 'to' for between two dates.

• By section of the paper - such as advertising, business, editorial and commentary, features, news, people and picture gallery
• By illustrations - this will return only articles with pictures

Results

• You can select from the results list to view only the article with your search term or the whole page so that you can see the article in context
• An image of the page appears next to the citation to indicate the position of the article on the page
• The blue citation heading in the results list may differ from the heading of the actual article where the search terms appear. It is recommended that you look at the full text of each article in the citation list
• Links will cross-link to:
  • articles on same page of paper
  • articles on same topic

Printing

• Mark articles to print a list of citations or to e-mail a citation list
• To print full text, open the article to full text and then select the print icon

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