On 23/10/2022 07:30, MB wrote:
On 22/10/2022 10:03, Jeff Layman wrote:
I've got a complete set of "Elektor" in the loft. It's from 1974/5 to
about 2014. Most have been available on WorldRadioHistory.com (was
AmericanRadioHistory I believe) for years. I was going to offer them the
missing editions to scan, but they have had to remove all the Elektors,
as the publisher now offers a paid-for service for old articles. It
would be a breach of copyright to continue to make them available
I guess I'll just have to dump them.
Try to give them away to somewhere where they might be useful, even if
it's only a charity shop, see below ...
There are copies of Wireless World online somewhere, you could check
whether they have a complete set of that magazine and others as they
might like to fill the gaps.
Sub Brit put all back copies online but were missing some editions so
put out an appeal for the missing copies (I sent a few that they did not have).
Does the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford have an archive?
Would they be interested?
Does the British Library have copies of the magazines?
My understanding is that the BL have copies of everything ever published
in the UK, but where that understanding came from originally - whether
a good source or just rumour - I can't now definitely remember. I
*think* it was actually from their site, but a brief look at it just now
didn't throw up any obvious support for the above claim. Perhaps email
them with details of any collections you have and ask them whether they
would like them?
https://www.bl.uk/
More generally, I would advise against throwing such collections away.
As someone who has recently spent a good deal of time trying to find the original newspapers and publication dates of various newscuttings that
members of my family had kept without such details, it's been
exasperating that so much history, even comparatively recent history,
that could have been kept, has been lost. Eventually, I emailed some
national and local newspapers in search of such information, and drew
universal blanks on the local ones. Hopefully they won't mind my
quoting their replies below, suitably anonymised.
However, first of all, for those it may help, the national newspaper
situation can be somewhat better ...
I discovered quite by chance some time ago that most issues of The Times
are available here, you can edit the URL directly to bring up a
particular year, but note that the navigator list on the left is really
clunky! For one thing, it's in alphabetical, not date order (doh!), and
for another, it goes back to the beginning, April, each time you click
on an issue to bring it up on the RHS, thus forcing you wearisomely to
navigate back down to the month of interest for the next chronological
issue:
https://archive.org/details/NewsUK1981UKEnglish
Another national newspaper, The Independent replied ...
"You can find a library of all editions and articles in our online
archive here -
https://www.newspapers.com/"
... and this is indeed useful for those clips where the headline is big
enough to make out on the thumbnail of the page, otherwise, after just 3
free page views, money seems to be involved, which I can't really afford.
A local newspaper replied:
"Unfortunately, while we provide photos for places across the country,
and over time - we don't have archivists that will be able to help you
identify the origin of the articles.
It may be worth contacting [county town] Library to see if they can
help? Their contact details can be found here: [URL]"
Another local newspaper replied rather bitterly:
"Thank you for your inquiry. Unfortunately I don't think there's much we
can do to help.
In pre-digital days we had our own cuttings library in which, as I know
from experience, cuttings on each story would have been filed in an
envelope along with prints of photos previously used, for future
reference, and it would then have been a matter simply of finding the
envelope and comparing the headlines with those you are trying to
locate. Such libraries were dispersed or discarded on cost grounds when newspapers switched over to digital production (a retrograde step, like
most of those which have been made since) and were not in most cases
digitised, given the volume of work involved and resulting expense.
Finding those stories now would involve locating copies of the papers
published in the weeks after the event and checking each page
individually. I believe hard copies of [list of local papers] are
available through [local town] Library and the [...] archive in [local
town] but, much to our collective regret, we have no such resources
ourselves; we all work from home and can't even obtain copies of the
newspapers we ourselves produce. Nor are back copies available.
I'm sorry not to be able to be of more (any) assistance, but sadly the
days when newspapers were the first draft of history and valued as such
are long gone, certainly in this part of the West Country."
Says it all really.
--
Fake news kills!
I may be contacted via the contact address given on my website:
www.macfh.co.uk
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