Papers Past – One Year On
The relaunched Papers Past website celebrated its first birthday this week. Since its release in September 2007 with the addition of full-text searching, Papers Past has been visited over 1.8 million times by more than 500,000 visitors, generating 31 million page views.
The website content has also grown over the period and now features 1.2 million newspaper pages from all around the country, generating around 7,500,000 searchable articles and covering the years 1839 to 1920. A highlight of the year was the release of the Grey River Argus, a significant source of early labour history and the first newspaper on Papers Past to cover the entire First World War.
New content will take site coverage through to 1930
In the coming year we will be completing the work to make all existing material searchable as well as adding a further 100,000 newspaper pages from these publication runs:
- Ashburton Guardian 1887-1889, 1896, 1898, 1910, 1921
- Ellesmere Guardian 1891-1899, 1904-1906
- NZ Truth 1906-1930
- Otautau Standard and Wallace County Chronicle 1905-1930
- Oxford Observer and Canterbury Democrat 1889-1901
- Victoria Times 1841.
New search functionality on the way
We will shortly be releasing new functionality on the website in response to user feedback. The changes will make dealing with large sets of search results easier to navigate.
Customer feedback on Papers Past
Response to the website's redevelopment have been overwhelmingly positive with users writing in with praise for the new version. Chris Pugsley described it as a 'sheer delight' and it made the top of Iain Sharp's list of most enjoyed reading in the Sunday Star Times BOOKS: Best of 2007. The website was also selected as a finalist in the Education and Government categories at the recent TUANZ awards.
Much of the feedback is coming from history and genealogy researchers but we’ve also heard some great stories from around the country of how the next generation is using the site in schools. Local history is the big area of interest and students are also using it to look at text and banner designs, advertising, comparing journalism styles through the years, and developing core online literacy skills.
