Readex and CRL Digitizing World News Archive

Readex (a division of NewsBank) has announced a partnership with the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) to create the World Newspaper Archive, which it describes as “the world's largest, fully searchable digital archive of international newspapers.” Wide-ranging digitization projects of primary sources like these are “highly valued by students and researchers in the humanities and social sciences,” said Glenda Pearson, human rights librarian and head of newspaper collections at the University of Washington, affording both a variety of firsthand historical perspectives while benefiting from the unified interface of a single information resource.

The first fruit of this effort will be 35 titles covering 19th- and early 20th-century Latin American newspapers. The product will be integrated to work with the America's Historical Newspapers collection from Readex and will compete directly with more specialized historical newspaper services from companies like ProQuest, LexisNexis, H.W. Wilson, and EBSCOhost.