Tuesday 22 January 2019

Newspaper access solved

I've recently written about my experiences doing family history online, and if you've been following my stuff more generally, you'l also know I use Trove, the NLA's  digital archive quite a lot.

What I don't have access to is UK newspapers, or I didn't until now.

Now I live in rural Victoria, and while I knew the State Library had access to a lot of these online, I thought that you had to visit the State Library itself to use some of the resources. (I remember discussions with database vendors in the early days of CDROM networking where access was restricted to a block of ip addresses - something they called access within a single building and I called frustrating).

Anyway I discovered that the State Library provides networked access to a shedload of resources including the Times and the Irish Times archives, but you need to (a) sign up and (b) prove you are a Victorian resident, usually by showing some ID to the membership team at the State Library, or by a more complex postal procedure.

Well, I was in Melbourne for other reasons, so I made time to go to the State Library and sign up for resource access.

I was so curious to see if it worked, that when I got back to our AirBnB apartment, I tried it using my iPad over our 4G modem - and it just worked!

Having spent a good part of my professional life trying to get these things to work I was quite astounded at just how good the service was (mind you, to get the best you probably need something with a little more poke than an iPad).

The service looks to be provided via Ex Libris, nothing special there, and uses the standard ProQuest databases. And it works.

I'm quietly happy ...

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