Sometime last year the New York Times became available online back to 1851. Their FAQ says:
But the FAQ nowhere deals with my question: Why are articles 1987-to-present free while 1923-1986 are pay? Does anyone know?
There seems to be a discrepancy or typo in the two FAQ questions, the first giving a dividing date between pay and free of 1986, the second 1980. Does anyone know which is correct?
Once an article is paid for it can be accessed 90 days only. Downloading is permitted. No articles are searchable. Google did a good job for me picking out an obscure reference to the long-demolished Blair Building in New York. It occurred, once only, in a 1903 NYT article about the construction of the New York Public Library. Once actually at the article, though, the .pdf’s search function would not find “Blair” for me in the body of the text.
Google is supposed to be so anti-New York Times, but Yahoo and AltaVista did not come up with that reference to the Blair Building.
Articles prior to 1923 are public domain, so can be given away. From 1923 and beyond, they might or might not be public domain, so there can’t be a blanket rule.
I would guess that in 1987, there was some change in who owned the rights to the article – most likely, a change in the Times’s standard contract.
You should check your local library. Most people have no idea that they’re already paying for massive article databases with their property taxes. Your state may even be providing it to all citizens. The New York Times is a very popular paper for libraries to provide to patrons electronically.
If your library gets the NY Times Historical from ProQuest it will much easier to search than the website. And you can fine tune the searches much better.
I learned tonight I have access to ProQuest at Muhlenberg College library but, as a town user, only from a library computer.
That’s the information I was looking for. Within those 62 hits I’ll find what I need. Google had only that one hit.
I’m glad to know about Proquest, Zsofia and BobT. I was unaware of it. Allentown Public Library’s and Muhlenberg College’s ProQuest have full access to our local daily newspaper as well (I also learned this evening) so my days of reading article stubs at the Morning Call’s website have come to an end. Allentown Public’s Proquest is available to me from any computer but it does not offer the New York Times. Thanks for the invitation to PM, samclem. I may do that when I can’t get to Muhlenberg. The new term started Tuesday so, for now, I’m good for the summer.