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If you've ever searched for newspaper articles that are more than 20 years old, you've probably wrestled with a microfilm or microfiche reader. These cumbersome devices were often indispensable for reading accounts of the 1960s civil rights marches, the skirmishes of World War II, or the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. But thanks to ProQuest Information and Learning (www.proquest.com/proquest/features/feature-04), those user-unfriendly days are gone. The online information service, which produced most of the microfilm used in research past, has recently completed digitizing the back issues of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal . And there are plans to add more newspapers.

Tina Frank, a librarian at Indian River High School in Philadelphia, NY, says her school's ProQuest database has led to several big collaborative projects with classroom teachers. The school's theater department recently tracked changes over the decades in fashion ads, social studies classes scanned back issues for political cartoons, and several English classes used old newspaper accounts to solve major crimes committed at the turn of the 20th century. "The stories really help the kids focus," Frank says. "They make life a 100 years ago real for them."

Jackie Michelson, a seventh-grade teacher at Springfield Township (PA) Middle School, asked her students to investigate how the Holocaust was reported in the New York Times from 1938 through 1946. Students were surprised to learn that press reports about the Nazis's treatment of Jews were scarce until nearly the end of World War II and that the word "Holocaust" wasn't used to describe the events until the 1950s. "Some of the students were angry to see stories about the Holocaust printed on page 32, when there was a car crash on page one," Michelson says.

Subscribers can search ProQuest's database by title, author, and type of article (for example, letters to the editor and real estate transactions). Users may also restrict their searches to photographs, reviews, classified ads, obituaries, comics, and weather reports. Most articles are available in two formats—as printable text or as a scanned image of what appeared in the newspaper. One of the database's added features includes a button that takes users to the most important news item on any given date. There's also an interactive time line that helps students visualize events as they unfolded. And students faced with a common classroom assignment—say, comparing the average price of a man's suit in 1860, 1890, and 1910—can now consult the original newspaper ads.

The digitizing process was a huge undertaking: it took about 18 months and involved a staggering amount of data. The text and images in the New York Times from Sept. 18, 1851, through 1999 add up to 4 terabytes of data—more than 3 million pages and 25 million articles including supplements and ads, says Jim Ulsh, general manager of the library resources division of bigchalk, ProQuest's parent company. To make matters more difficult, back in 1938, when ProQuest (then called University Microfilms) began photographing the Times, many of its back issues were more than 80 years old and deteriorating. To make these old images more legible, ProQuest has used advanced optical character-recognition software, a more sophisticated version of the technology that comes with many scanners.

Historical databases still have a few kinks, most notably last summer's Supreme Court decision in Tasini v. The New York Times, which ruled that publishers could not place articles by freelance writers in electronic databases without their permission. This means that many New York Times articles written between 1980 and 1996 can only be read in ProQuest Historical Newspapers as scanned documents and not as text.

Another potential snafu involves the long-term preservation of digitized newspapers. Digital files saved on CD-ROMs and DVDs may start to decay after as little as 10 years. Database providers, such as ProQuest, will need to regularly update the PDF and text formatting in their databases to make sure they can still be read by computers 50 or 100 years from now—an expensive task.

Even fans of ProQuest's historic database admit that the new resource is tricky to use. The difficulty, say some educators, is that its search interface actually offers too many choices, thus restricting searches to a narrow range of considerations. To make the interface more user-friendly, Ulsh is heading a project to completely revamp it. He says the new version will include a button that will enable users to find back issues that correspond to a particular date—a feature particularly helpful to students who are creating time lines and those who want to find out what occurred 30 years ago on their birthday.

The next two newspapers that will be digitized by ProQuest are the Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor . But many school and public libraries want more. "Whenever I show [the database] to librarians and [advanced placement] history teachers, the first question they ask is, 'When are you going to do my [city's] paper?'" says Ulsh. ProQuest plans to include additional American newspapers over the next few years.

Other companies are digitizing print publications in similar ways. The Times Digital Database, launched by the Gale Group last year as an ambitious supplement to its Infotrac reference database, contains issues of the Times of London. As with ProQuest's database, users of the Times Digital Database (www.galegroup.com/Times) can limit their searches to ads, photographs, and news stories. Currently, the database offers the Times from 1920 to 1967, but 200 years of the British newspaper, from 1785 to 1985, will be digitized by the end of next year.

HarpWeek (www.harpweek.com) is a smaller database that provides access to past issues of Harper's Weekly , which was considered the equivalent of Newsweek magazine when it was published from 1857 to 1912. Harper's Weekly was heavily illustrated with wood engravings and featured extensive coverage of the Civil War, Lincoln's assassination, and other historically significant events.

Do the new databases mean that school and public libraries should jettison their microfilm and microfiche collections? Not so fast. While historical newspaper databases are now common in academic libraries, they will probably make their way much more slowly into K–12 schools. Meanwhile, it's cheaper for school libraries to update their existing collections than to pay the databases' annual subscription fees of $1,500–$2,000.