ResearchBuzz

Was it Deutsch Digitization Day and nobody told me? The latest German periodical to put its back issues online is Focus, a German news weekly. This archive is available at http://www.focus.de/magazin/archiv .

This archive contains everything from Focus back to 1993, with the exception of the current issue, which will be put online after a delay. You can do a full-text search by keyword, or narrow your search by section. Clicking on the “Erweiterte Sucheinstellungen” (More Search Options) link takes me to a 404 error.

I did a search for Republik. I got over 3100 results. Results are default listed by relevance, but can also be listed by what I think are date and section of the periodical. Clicking on the title of the article gives you an image of that issue’s cover and the text of the article — again, no actual page images. It looks like even in the archive you have the option to rate the article in addition to printing and e-mailing it.

Die Zeit, a German newspaper, has launched a free online archive that goes back to 1946 and contains over 250,000 stories. The archive is available at http://www.zeit.de/archiv/index .

My German’s not very good, but it looks like you can browse the contents by year, do a full text search, or do field searching, including title, author, year, and date span.

I did a search for “Dusty Springfield”. There were seven results, ranging from 1973 to 2007. Results included the title and author of the article as well as a snippet. Click on the title and you’ll go to the article. It looks like just the text is available — I didn’t see digitized images.

You’ll get more out of this archive, obviously, if your German is better than mine. One caveat: the search results seem to take a little longer than usual.