Primary Sources: The Times Digital Archive

The Times Digital Archive was recently upgraded to include content from 1986-2006, and now includes every complete page of every issue of  The Times (London) from 1785 to 2006.

Search tips:

  • Use Advanced Search to search for keywords in the title, author, or entire story. 
  • Advanced Search allows you to limit your search to a broad (News, Business) or narrow (Display Advertising, Deaths) category of story. 
  • “Fuzzy search” in Advanced Search allows you to locate a word or words within works despite imperfect matches in spelling between the searched term and document content (and possible OCR errors). The Low setting will slightly expand your search results to include very near matches on your term(s) and the High setting will expand your results to include very broad matches on your term(s). 
  • Use quotation marks to search for phrases. 
  • Use an asterisk (*) to search for variations of a word: A search on carib* finds Carib, Caribs, Carribbean, caribe, caribou. 
  • Use an exclamation point (!) to substitute for a letter in a word: A search on colo!r finds color and colour. 
  • The Browse by Date option lets you find an individual issue of the newspaper and view the articles page by page. 

An impressive feature of this resource is the ability to move easily from the article view to a page view with an accompanying list of articles on that page, to a browsable list of pages in the issue. Marking the items will allow you to save the citations for download, printing or emailing. Printing or downloading the articles should be done from the article view screen.