1913-2017 | The Record of the Newspaper of Record

The treasures abound, and thank the good Lord that David Dunlap is helping bring some forward so most aren't entirely lost in our technological shuffle.

Funny how the New York Times seems to quietly weave its way through the landscape of America and we never fully realize it until it is not there.

I used to use the Times index all the time when I was in college and afterwards when I needed to find information. But years ago. it disappeared from the public libraries and I didn’t even know it still existed. It’s a terrible loss. It means that much of modern history will be unavailable, not just to students but to all seekers of information about our world.

As a substitute for the index, the Search feature in the online edition is completely useless, even for finding current information. When I want to find something in the NYT, I go to Google and specify the Times and I get what I’m looking for immediately.

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- Party slogan, "1984" by George Orwell.

“We can try to understand the New York Times' effect on man” -- Bee Gees "Stayin' Alive"

Neonihilism tells us all these "facts" ain't necessarily true, and you can't believe everything you read in the newspaper. There was a day when I believed nearly everything I read in the Chicago Tribune - and I ended up voting for Nixon and Ronald Reagan for cripe sake. I deeply rue those votes, of course. You are only as good as your reading material and who knows where to turn now. Away?

I think I missed something, why couldn't an electronic version of this be produced? If electronic, seems like it would be a much easier way to help locate critical information than a websearch, where you may be confronted with thousands of references to irrelevant material. I would have paid extra for an electronic version of this but didn't know it existed.

I wonder if any of today's readers or Times writers remember, but there was a Katherine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy movie about this eventuality,(humans replaced by computer), made in the 50's called "Desk Set". It was a romance but it was also prescient concerning the push towards replacement of research people in a news organization by computer.
Machines failed in the movie, and having used many library systems, myself, trying to retrieve information, I know I am happier with the way people arranged data in 1900 than now. Computers remain cold and hard edged and always will be. The end of humans in research libraries and newspaper indexes will diminish the ability of students to obtain information and thus diminish everyone's ability to draw on such resources.

While the Record certainly served a vital purpose, I would urge those who appreciated the fact that on " your way to finding whatever it is you're looking for you'll be diverted by a lot else, all of it enlightening. For example a search about Armstrongs walk on the moon brought me to this :

"...a reproduction of the never-­delivered statement William Safire prepared for President Nixon in case the Apollo 11 moon landing went disastrously wrong and astronauts were stranded on the lunar surface..."

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi! Truly a sad day to see the honored resource disappear. I could not have done my dissertation research without the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, the stacks at the Paul Klapper Library at Queens College, the 5th Avenue brance of the NYPL, and of course, the venerable NY Times Index!

What does the "Newspaper of Record" mean exactly. Is it a self indulgent superlative, that has no real meaning outside of newspaper circles? Is it a nickname like "The Grey Lady"? Is it a researcher's term? Does it, actually, have any historical significance? I would like to brag that my opinions are based on reading "the Paper of Record" but I don't feel comfortable using that term when I can't answer the, simple, question "What does that mean?".

So what replaces this? Is the cheap visual image replacing the thought of summarizing and indexing?

Sorry to see this go. The New York Times Index was always my go-to resource for all my undergraduate and graduate projects. Of course, that was a few decades ago.

Back in my high school and college days, the Times Index was just something that you learned about and how to use. Didn't know it was still in production and sad to see it go although truth be told I haven't needed it since college.

Question: I have a vague memory, also about 40+ years old, of going to a facility on the West side [theater districty] where old editions of the Times were stored to be perused by those doing research. Do I have that correct?