How Can I Get Both Ads and Articles from the 1954 NY Times?

Question

I need a bunch of articles and ads from the 1954 NY Times. I know I can buy articles from NYTimes online but ads are not available. Plus my budget is limited and I my local library does not have the microfilm. I live in the Bay Area. Is there any method to get this stuff for free?

Let me add that I would love to get the material in PDF form, especially the ads.

Answer 1

When I saw your question, I thought, "I'll tell him about microfilm" but then I saw you already had that figured out.

One thing you might try is the New York Public Library (I've listed the site in the sources.) Their librarians will answer questions for anyone, even people who live outside of New York. I live in SoCal and I've had very good results with them. The reason I refer you to them is because the NYT is their hometown paper and they will probably have resourses SF libraries don't have.

Good luck.

Answer 2

SFOX 1 is on the Money - - - yo let us throw it up for the Librarians - - - do what She says Plus check some of your local libraries especially the Universities because quite frankly any Library that doesn't keep copies of The New York Times and certain other periodicals are dumb. Dumber than a bag of hammers. I was raised in 'Bum - F - - - ' Everett up in itsy bitsy (at the time) Washington and they had 'microfilm' copies of several national newspapers. And check for a local Chapter of 'The Empire Society,' essentially expatriate New Yorkers, and other societies that contain Native New Yorkers, certain they would be happy to guide you in the right direction. Peace..

Answer 3

After reading this article from a librarian who also runs a cool blog (more on that later), I learned that most libaries offer full text access to many digitized newspapers.

http://www.betanews.com/article/Finding_Answers_Beyond_Web_Search/1118246650

In fact, the San Francisco Public Library (perfect!) offers FOR FREE the full text and full image of every page of the newspaper searchable and including ads back to 1857 (Vol. 1 nummber 1).
It's amazing. Pages can be printed or saved as PDF files. ALL YOU NEED is a library card and this is free. Again, this is national. All libraries offer diff databases. Here's the SF Public List.
http://www.sfpl.org/sfplonline/dbcategories.htm

You can even download audio books to your MP3 player and access another database I found that has over 57 million articles. Many in PDF form.

Btw, the person who wrote the article also writes here about newspaperarchive.com, that offers hundreds of thousands of full image and text articles (searchable) about various subjects.
See:
http://www.resourceshelf.com/2006/06/19/resources-more-free-historical-newspaper-archives-from-newspaperarchivecom/

and
http://newspaperarchive.com/DesktopModules/ViewHtml.aspx?htfile=FreeArchives.htm

As you can see from the time I posted this answer, I've been up all night reviewing this Resourceshelf site. So many cool databases about so many things, hard to sleep. This migh be my favvoritee categorie:
http://www.resourceshelf.com/category/real-time-information/

Answer 4

Have you tried Ask.com? You recommend that for everything else ;)