Pink ’un cure for economic blues

The launch of a complete Financial Times archive comes at the perfect time for economists and researchers

Publisher Gale Cengage

URL http://gale.cengage.co.uk/

Until now, researchers, financial historians, journalists and academics had to visit the British Library in London to access articles and features from past editions of the Financial Times. But now they can access the complete run of the prestigious newspaper online from their universities and departments. From February 2010, a total of 119 years of global business and economic news from the FT is available online, with the launch by Gale, part of Cengage Learning, of the Financial Times Historical Archive 1888-2006.
Nearly 800,000 pages of financial news and features, market listings and even cartoons and advertisements are viewable. Whatever the content, it is displayed in the context of the full page and the issue on the day it was published. The web resource comes at a time when institutions, government and academics are showing keener interest than usual in economic history to see how our predecessors handled economic crises in their day.
Seth Cayley, publisher for media history at Cengage, says: “While we were ready to launch the site in 2010, the current recession has doubled the value such focused financial information websites can provide. Interest in economic history had been in decline but now, even within universities, it is the most sought after course. This resource is a helpful tool in understanding the financial past and we are targeting universities, public libraries, government institutions and research communities services.”
According to Gale, the archive is the first online resource with a complete collection of every single FT ever published. Even the archives in FT.com, the newspaper’s own online resource, date back only to 2004, presents the articles in text format, is not cross-searchable and has not been indexed. Gale’s historic archive presents every article in its original page format, providing researchers with a context.
Boer war to 90s bust
Info pros will be able to access highlights of past decades, ranging from the Boer War and the fall of Communism to the rise of the car industry and its effect on regional and national economies, from the Wall Street Crash to the housing bubbles of the past few decades. Professionals can get insights into how Europe recovered from the world wars, the 1929 Crash, wartime financial history and even the recession of the 1990s.
The homepage contains essays such as a financial history of the last 120 years, scandals and debacles, real-estate boom and bust, and a brief history of the FT by historian David Kynaston. The essays offer a quick overview for researchers or students looking at a specific aspect of economic history.
The researcher can then move on to the newspaper archives. In addition to all the pages of all the newspapers, it offers such content as FT Weekend, FT magazines and supplements.
The archives are primarily divided into eight groups, including news and business, arts and leisure, editorials, cartoons, market news and even advertising. Each category can be filtered further; for instance, in the advertising, it is possible to select and search display ads or classifieds.
An extremely flexible view allows users to zoom in on the articles, and a full-page view offers highlighted columns. The pages are readable and the images sharp and clean, and a scrolling timeline along the bottom of the page picks out the highlights for each year. A basic Google-like search box lets users perform a broad range of search. The advanced search feature will narrow a search on the basis of dates, sections, keywords, authors, topics and so on. This segmentation allows fast retrieval and review of relevant articles.
Copyright protection
While users are allowed to save individual articles or pages and print them, a pop-up appears with every print command to warn of breach of copyright if information is used for commercial purposes or mass sharing.
Gale has digitised and indexed all the newspaper pages from its own microfilms dating back to the first FT newspaper. The pages were scanned into digitised formats with tag recognition and XML indexing.
The information is cross-searchable with Gales’ The Times and The Economist archives, creating an authoritative historical newspaper resource spanning three centuries. Cayley says that Gale will maintain a four-year gap to the present by adding one year’s newspaper data to the archive every year: “In 2011, we will add 2007’s newspapers and so on, so that it doesn’t remain stuck only until 2006.”
Mark Holland, EMEA publishing director for Gale Cengage Learning, says: “The archive will be welcomed as an essential primary source for all researchers, teachers and students working on international business, finance and politics, from the height of the Victorian era to the 21st century.”
Cayley adds: “If we were to make improvements, they would definitely be some Web 2.0 features. Just as our State Papers Online hosts interactive features, enabling users to make annotations and share notes and inputs with others would have boosted the appeal of the product far better.”
Cayley also candidly points out that the microfilms it scanned were black and white, so the pages themselves lack the FT’s distinctive salmon-pink livery. However, the website designers have used a salmon-pink background throughout the site and the same fonts, bringing users as close to the original paper version as possible.
Pricing starts from £2,000 for an annual subscription, and depends on size and type of institution. An outright purchase model with annual service charges is also available. Cengage hosts the site itself, so additional data or changes appear in real time and automatically whenever subscribers use it.