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Finding old newspaper columns online

I like to read interesting news columns. One that really enjoyed was Lydel Sims, a columnist with the Memphis Commercial Appeal daily newspaper. Recently, I discovered a trick using Google News, to search for archives of such older columns. (Google has been scanning the microfilm/microfiche of some older newspaper archives and applying text recognition to the resulting scans. The results are really good.)

1. Go to news.google.com
2. (You may need to choose the USA version of Google if you are doing this from outside the USA.)
3. Click on "Advanced News Search" to the right of the Google News search buttons
4. Click on "Archive Search" for articles more than 30 days old
5. Enter a search term, such as "Lydel Sims" and let Google return the results

You should get a lot of results, some of which are free and some of which are pay to view. Clicking on one of the search results loads a full-page scan of the newspaper itself! You can then navigate the "newspaper" and read the article of interest. For example, here is a search result from May 25, 1986 from the Deseret News. If you go to the advanced settings for the archive search, you can narrow down the search to certain "sources" (such as the name of the newspaper itself).

What makes this a bit more interesting is the nice timeline view which can narrow down your search by decade and even by month. This makes searching for specific references a lot easier. Gone are the days when you need to search volumes of indexes of newspapers and then hunt down the microfilm for those pages. This makes it much faster and easier. (Although there is something very bookwormish about getting lost in the research section of a library...)

Happy reading!