News Formats: Online PDFs

Format:

A copy of the original article saved in Adobe's Portable Document Format. Some early years of ProQuest newspaper titles are scanned from the microfilm version.

Examples:

ProQuest Historical Newspapers (Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and many other newspaper titles).
ProQuest Digitized Newspapers

Content:

ProQuest Historical Newspapers contains main-line newspapers from the date of first publication to a moving date some number of years ago depending on the title. Full original content displayed in as PDF files. Original layout, color, and graphics.

Pros:

Easy to search full text; networked; available in the original format.

Cons:

Very expensive either initially or ongoing; some titles currently reproduced from microfilm, quality can be poor; searches are incomplete due to accuracy limitation of the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software used to generate the searchable text. Limited availability of titles. Either not current or current but with limited archive.

Access rating:

Good. Networked.

Preservation rating:

Good.