Sunday Leader Archives Now Accessible Online!

The Sunday Leader archives are now available online. I am pretty sure that this is a recent development, I am sure that they wasn’t a link to them last week. At the moment they seem to date back to 2007 but hopefully they will add as much archived material as possible.

Why is this important? Because if you want to do some research, this is free information on all the political and social happenings in the country from 2007 onwards. And if you are a journalist or writer or blogger, you will have to do research at some point. Think of the possibilities. If you wanted to write an expose on a politician you only have to go back through all the articles in the archives. Remember when a certain politican barged into the SLBC station? Or when two Buddhist priests got hospitalized after a brawl in Parliament? What did the paper think of those incidents? What was the reaction of the parties involved? See how this stuff can be useful?

What would make the archives better would be if they were actually made searchable so that you could put in a search term and bring up the articles that matched those terms. At the moment you can’t do that, you have to go through every single article to see if it is what you want. You can only narrow it down if you know what part of the paper a particular article was published in or if you want to look at all the news for a given month or year. So a searchable database would be nice, Ms. Frederica Jansz. Pretty pretty please with a cherry on top. The current archives are created within an ASP framework so it can’t be too hard to upload an accessible database to the server? Or am I wrong on that score? You can create one in Access and cut, copy, paste the articles in and give them keywords and tags or categories. WHO is your web admin?

Cheers, Marisa.