Geneva, Switzerland (Le Temps, Fre) – The headline seems misleading at first, Première suisse: les archives d’un journal en libre accès sur le Net, which might lead you to think one of the newspapers in Switzerland has changed its attitude to the Internet and is offering yesterday’s news, all of it, for free.
That is, in fact, correct, but the newspaper in question, the Journal de Geneve, died in 1998. The news is nevertheless important for researchers because the newspaper was for 172 years, a serious observer of society, politics and business in Geneva.
For Le Temps, the significance goes beyond this, however: it is the result of an agreement between the National Library and Switzerland’s newspapers that will result in their archives becoming available online, apparently for free. (Ed. note: no major Swiss newspapers make their complete current content available online, free of charge).
This work by genevalunch.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.
News story, GenevaLunch, 12 December 2008.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Tags: archives, online content, Swiss National Library, Swiss newspapers
January 6th, 2009 at 12:03 am
and now Le Temps’ article you link to has moved to paid access only too. But the jumbo vademecum (7.7 Mb of an image PDF, unusable by blind people and awkward for all readers) is still “freely accessible” at http://www.letemps.ch/custom/imagesSpecial/Edition3348/Rubrique2/ArticleId246056/8654.pdf …
January 6th, 2009 at 7:54 am
Thank you – good point about the article disappearing. We link less and less often to articles from Le Temps because I think it is poor service to send readers to a site where they have to pay to continue reading. The link you’ve supplied is just instructions for using the archives, right? At least that is what I’m seeing. And going to http://www.letempsarchives.ch as they suggest simply brings up an unavailable page. At this point I’m inclined to say the new service of offering archived old Swiss newspapers is overblown.
January 6th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Le Temps at least keeps articles online for a couple of weeks. With the online versions of Ticino dailies (La regione, Corriere del Ticino and Giofnale del popolo), content disappears at midnight of the same day from the publicly accessible part into the “subscribers-only” part of their sites. As a consequence, search engines don’t index it…
The paradox is that guidelines for serious publications often request that web pages be cited in an archived version. For instance I just did that for this post using webcitation.org and obtaining:
“Wallace, Ellen. Journal de Geneve is first free online newspaper (but it’s dead). GenevaLunch. 2009-01-06. URL:http://genevalunch.com/2008/12/12/journal-de-geneve-is-first-free-online-newspaper-but-its-dead/. Accessed: 2009-01-06. (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5dcsUVHpP)”
Had I not goofed when I tried to do that with Le Temps article about the archives of JdG, there would be a copyright-violating but academic-standards-complying copy of it…
Re http://www.letempsarchives.ch/ giving an error page: it often happens, particularly over the week-end. Presently, it is working again, at least for me. These glitches might be due to the proprietary complex – and “copyright protecting” – software they chose to use: an adaptation of Olive ActivePaper Archive http://www.olivesoftware.com/products/activepaperarchive.asp , according to N. Dufour’s text in the overweight PDF vademecum. If you have 3 versions – image, pdf, simple text – versions of each page, plus a proprietary though XML-based application giving different instructions about what the text file should do the the image and PDF files according to whether the article is in the public domain or still under copyright, you court glitches. Apart from excluding blind people and making life difficult for all users…
January 6th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Thanks for this very useful information. The media world is in such desperate financial straits that publications continue to think they’ll make money by having subscriptions – either directly or indirectly by offering more material to people who pay. I can’t think of a single example where this actually works, and the irritation it causes does publications a lot of harm. This is why GenevaLunch is opting for a community-supported business model that provides a true community service: making all of our information available free of charge, all the time. At the root of the discussion is a philosophical and not a business model difference – either the Web is open or it isn’t. Efforts to close the door to parts of it and exclude people is the result of thinking of it as a source of money, rather than a source of information. Ok if your business is socks but not ok if it is news and information, we say.
December 4th, 2011 at 8:40 pm
Pdf books free…
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