New Irish Newspapers Archive Now Available

There's a new archive of Irish newspapers available. And though the site does cost, searching is free and downloading the first ten documents is free. You can try it at http://irishnewspaperarchives.com/.

There are eight publications currently available, including The Freeman's Journal (issues span from 1763 to 1924), Irish Independent (1905 - 2003), and The Sunday Independent (1935 - 2006). You can browse the issues by date, but to view them you'll have to be a member (more about that in a minute.)

Searching the archive is by keyword. You can limit your search to a certain publication or a date range. My search for historical found over 21,000 results with a thumbnail of the page where the word was found, source, date, page number, and some of the oddest search snippets I've ever read. It looked like most of them were keyword listings instead of transcript snippets. Ah, I see some newspapers are not completely indexed and they do indeed have keywords instead of snippets.

Back to the membership. As I said, in order to read stories or view pages, you'll need to be a member. Membership requires name and address. Once you've registered you'll have to confirm your address. Once you've registered you will have ten free credits. Going back to the search results I clicked on the thumbnail to open a page, and it looked like Adobe Acrobat Reader launched. But once launched, it popped up an error message, "Operation Not Allowed". Some kind of security setting on Firefox? Perhaps you'll have better luck than I did. At any rate, if you do and you want to continue using the service, you can purchase more credits. They start at €10.00 for 20 credits, and one credit buys one page image. Not bad at all. Discounts are given when ordering more credits.

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