A free and fully searchable edition of the Northern Star is
now available online. Although still officially in a beta (test) version, you
can find this important Chartist newspaper on the Nineteenth Century Serials Edition website along with a
number of other papers from the period.
Go straight to the Northern Star online.
Getting the paper up and running like this is a fantastic
achievement for all concerned, and they deserve the thanks of family historians
everywhere for their efforts.
These are early days, and I am still getting to grips with
the site. I was delighted to see that along with the paper, the site includes
about half of the 34 prints known to have been given away with the paper during its
15-year existence.
This version also has an advantage over the version
available to academic institutions since last year in that it each page of the
Northern Star that you open is accompanied by metadata – information about the
page itself.
On the downside, I have not so far found the process of
getting from a search result to an image of that word or phrase on the page
particularly easy to navigate. But these are early days and any archive as
sophisticated of this needs and deserves some practice.
I have now added a page called How to read the Northern
Star to Chartist Ancestors. It is not yet complete, but it is worth getting a bit of the history before you have a look
at the paper itself...
No comments:
Post a Comment