The Spectator – the oldest continuously-published magazine in the English-speaking world – has made its entire archive from its launch in 1828 online, providing a useful free resource for historians.
The home page details the arduous process: “Every page has been scanned and digitised, each article tagged and extracted, so that you can search the whole archive by content, keyword, topic, location, and date.”
Both scanned and digitised copies of the magazine covering the period from, July 1828 to December 2008 can now be browsed online using the beta Spectator Archive, with more modern material available on their egular website, spectator.co.uk.
We’ve already spent time reading about the notorious baby-farming house in Brixton in 1870.
The magazine says that the process of digitising 1.5 million page remains a work in progress and that there’s still a few gaps to be filled – and some of the OCR is a bit out too!
You can view the archive here: Spectator Archive.
