The great thing about the Web is its ability to make mass amounts of information easily accessible. Hell, Google built an empire on that principle alone. The latest addition is the cleverly named TimesMachine, the archive from The New York Times that allows users to see the paper and read articles from 1851-1922. (The dates cover the public domain archive of the Times. This blog post explains the process of how TimesMachine came to be, but it doesn't tell you if/when they might put more recent content online.)
The user interface is very well designed and easy to use. There are a few small nitpicks I have, but none seriously affect performance or usage. The first is the inability to click on an article when you scroll over it. The article highlights in blue and a box pops up, but you have to click the link inside the box to get to a PDF of the article. The other bummer is that you can't click on the ads. It would be fun if users could zoom in on those. They add a tremendous amount of historical value. On the plus side, most of the large ads can be viewed just fine as is.
SI Vault, the Sports Illustrated archive, is a similar tool that allows users to flip through as if they were reading the magazine (so you can check out the ads). The site only has some issues available with the "reader," but does contain complete archives (some are text only).
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