ResearchBuzz

If you have English ancestry, an interest in your family’s history, and some patience, do I have a site for you. It’s a Web site aggregating the proceeding of the trials at the Old Bailey (the Central Criminal Court in England) from 1674-1913. This site covers almost 200,000 trials.

The site is running a bit slowly at the moment, and you may have to make several attempts before you can successfully run a search. . You can search by name, but you can also search by keyword or offense. A search for Smith found (after several attempts and lots of time outs) lots of results presented ten at a time, with the title and date of the case (” Judith Smith, defendant name in trial of Judith Smith, Theft > other, 11th December 1678.”) along with a bit of context.

The trial information page contains the content of the trial information. This can be as brief as a few paragraphs or as extensive as a lot of testimony. This selection concerning four eight-year-old boys who stole 48 bottles of ale is only one paragraph long.

In addition to seeing the transcript of legal proceedings, there’s also an option to see the original page of proceedings. (It’s a GIF image.) The one I managed to load was really really REALLY hard to read. I’ll stick to the transcripts.

This site is going to be a fun timesink, but it isn’t yet — it’s too slow and there are too many time out errors. I think I’ll come back in a week or so…

Actually it’s not just a search engine for UK media but a nicely-put-together set of tools. Kudos to Martin Belam, who created Chipwrapper, available in beta at http://www.chipwrapper.co.uk/ .

So what kind of tools? Chipwrapper starts with a Google Custom Search that searches a variety of newspapers and news sources in the UK, including BBS, The Scotsman, The Telegraph, and The Times. I liked the quality of the results, but unfortunately as the results are for WEB and not NEWS, you can’t list them by date and you don’t get date of creation for the articles. (I would love to see a Google Custom News search.) On the upside you’ll probably getting more archive results here.

You don’t have to search to get news immediately, though. There’s a headline aggregator on the front page that shows current top headlines from several different sources. For an even more delineated look at the top stories, check out the Headline Buzz, which is seven of the most popular words in the UK’s headlines within the past hour. (click on those words and a Chipwrapper search will run for that word.) There’s a tag cloud also available for http://www.chipwrapper.co.uk/buzz/ .

There are several RSS feeds available for Chipwrapper (you can get a list at http://www.chipwrapper.co.uk/tools/rss_feeds.shtml .) There are also a couple of plugins and a toolbar button. Lots of tools here, all built around UK media search. Nicely done.

Next Saturday (November 3) Guardian News and Media will launch two digital archives — one for The Guardian from 1821-1975, and one for The Observer from 1900-1975. (These are both UK papers.) While this is an extensive launch, it’s not complete — the rest of the archive will launch in early 2008 and will include the Guardian from 1821-2003 and the Observer from 1791-2003.

You can learn more about the upcoming archives at guardian.co.uk/archive . The archive will be fully-searchable and viewable in full-page and individual-article levels. What I find interesting is that access to the content does not seem to be available on a per-article basis; instead, timed passes are available. A 24-hour pass is £7.95 while a one-month pass is £49.95. (There’s a sale on passes until the end of November; passes cost 50% of the prices I’ve listed here.)

The announcement of the new archive mentioned that there would be a free 24-hour access period, but the archive page doesn’t mention when that will be — I’ll keep my eyes out. In the meantime, if you want a sample of what the archive will look like but don’t want to spend the scratch, you can check out a sample issue.