Online Text News

[Fred Shapiro]

The Hartford Courant has now come up on ProQuest.  This is ostensibly
exciting news, since the Courant goes back to 1764, but I searched the
damn thing for hours and couldn't find a single antedating.  I conclude
that this has been an exceptionally boring newspaper.  It would have been
better if they digitized the other very old newspaper, the New York Post.

At some point Thomson Gale will be bringing up American Fiction 1774-1910
and Nineteenth Century British Periodicals.  The first of these will help
with one of the biggest gaps in online coverage, namely post-1800 books.
The second one, although not of much interest to all you slang-obsessed
types, addresses one of the other biggest gaps, namely British
periodicals.  I assume it will include such important periodicals as the
Quarterly Review and Edinburgh Review.

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and     YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
   Access and Lecturer in Legal Research     Yale University Press,
Yale Law School                             forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               http://quotationdictionary.com
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