The newspaper library of La Vanguardia, which turned 142 years old on February 1, is not only an invaluable heritage for this newspaper, but for the entire country. Through its digital edition, historians, researchers, sociologists and curious readers resort to it. In a few clicks you can go from History in capital letters to small individual and family histories, collected in information about accidents, weddings or obituaries. Even the ads reveal how we’ve changed.
Teresa Amiguet, a member of the documentation team and head of this service, points out that “in a hundred-year-old newspaper like ours, the newspaper library works the miracle of connecting our readers directly with the story as told by our famous journalists and firms. Its digitization has brought democratization and globalization of access to it, together with advanced search tools. In addition, we work to value these historical contents”.
To facilitate access and make consultations more agile, a renewed version of the newspaper library was launched in December, clearer and with new functionalities. But its most loyal users and the documentation team itself were quick to detect that some searches had become complicated or did not offer results as refined as before.
“The current search engine has worsened compared to the previous system. (…) Whatever the search string, it gives thousands of results for a relatively small window of time, without being able to filter”, warned the subscriber Salvador Alegret. “The previous version of the newspaper library was by far the best of the state newspapers and perhaps the world,” explained Emili Ascaso, who nevertheless warned that after the redesign “the search is very difficult, they have removed the summaries in columns.” For his part, Xavier Cazaneuve, a professional historian, exposed in a long and detailed email the utilities that he now missed.
Most of the lost functions that these and other readers have detected have already been reincorporated in recent weeks to the new newspaper library. Users should already notice the difference: literal searches can be done using double quotes, a list view has been added to the per-page view that shows the context of the words searched for, and you can also navigate back and forth between editions without having to do a new search.
From here, we thank the readers who have helped us detect what had to be checked and we encourage them to continue doing so so that we can all travel as comfortably as possible in this wonderful time machine.
