Help Needed Finding Stuff On The Interwebby Thingy

[wolf63]

Hello

I need ('want' actually) to research some news stories that have happened in our little part of Scotland in the last 50 years or so. I want to be able to google the information or to go to a website where I can find some information.

What is the most straightforward way of doing this?

I don’t need in depth details about the crimes/incidents. It will, hopefully, be a short book/pamphlet give from my brother's birthday or Xmas. I hope that he doesn't find this.

Will there be any potential problems with publishing these stories or will I be okay if I state which newspaper I stole them from? That is IF I find them.

[fiction-factory]

Is there a local weekly newspaper? Sometimes they have put some archives on line or you can view archive printed copies somewhere, maybe on microfiche

[wolf63]

I will start there. FF. I will start looking in the morning.

Why is it, when you are a kid you want to stay up later and later, then when you grow up you find yourself so tired that you are planning on going to be before seven! Life is pretty screwy sometimes.

Night !

[jennyjoan]

Hi Wolfie - if you go to bed so early - do you sleep all night right through till morning. It is a long night.

Lately I am finding myself going to bed early too but it would be 9.30 or 10 and do watch TV until about 12 or 1.

[wolf63]

JJ - I have always been a bad sleeper and only sleep in cycles of about one and a half or two hours and then I wake up again. The fact that the cats wake me up early for breakfast doesn't help.

I am just about at the stage where I will go and turf a cat off my bed and then crawl into it.

I hope you sleep well tonight.

[jennyjoan]

thanks Wolfie and hope you get a deep rested sleep. I couldn't survive on a cuppla hours - I would be dead beat next day.

[Buenchico]

Many local news stories are actually quite hard to research on the internet. Firstly, many local newspapers routinely delete content from their websites after a fairly short period of time. (That's partly to ensure that people can't find details of local offenders' spent convictions, thus undermining the principles of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, and often also just to save a bit of space on their server). Further, most newspapers have only had websites for around a couple of decades and they've never put older content online.

So local libraries or (possibly far better still) County Records Offices are often a much better place to search.

Here are a couple of (hopefully useful) pointers for you when searching the web though:

1. Remember that the use of double quotation marks forces Google to include pages which only include the specific string enclosed within those marks. For example, searching for "Needham Market' (with those quotation marks) will only show pages which include the name of that Suffolk town. Omitting them might also find references to the town of Needham in Norfolk and/or pages including the word 'market'.

2. To limit your search to a specific website include 'site:' before the relevant web address. For example, searching for this . . .
"going on holiday" site:theanswerbank.co.uk
will only return pages from AB (and nowhere else) which include the phrase 'going on holiday'.

With regards to copyright, you won't have any problems as:
(a) nobody will know about it ; and
(b) there's no copyright in news anyway. (There can be copyright in a specific article, in terms of the way in which it is written, but the actual facts within news reports are exempted by copyright legislation).

[Buenchico]

PS: I think that you might be in Angus ('cos you've previously mentioned that you're not very far from Arbroath). If so, and you're able to get to local libraries, here are the newspapers which are archived at each of them:

Arbroath: Arbroath Herald
Brechin: Brechin Advertiser
Carnoustie: Broughty Ferry Guide and Carnoustie Gazette
Forfar: Forfar Dispatch
Kirriemuir: Kirriemuir Free Press (to 1975), Kirriemuir Herald
Monifeth: No newspapers held from before 1992. (Possibly the Guide and Gazette thereafter? Use Carnoustie library for newspapers covering Monifeth pre-1992)
Montrose: Montrose Standard (to 1970), Montrose Review

You're far more likely to find relevant material there than online (and it can be quite interesting reading old newspapers anyway!)

[wolf63]

Thanks cat man.

It will be the Perthshire advertiser and Dundee courier - I am in Perth city centre.

It's silly stories - like the day one of our well known drunks found a machine gun that had fallen off the back of a passing truck.

I'm off for a snooze

[jno]

you could try the British Newspaper Archive

http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/

they go up to the 1950s, though not with every paper, and there are lots they don't have; but you might find something from the beginning of your search period. You can search for free but have to pay to see the results in full, but your library may have a subscription.