Milwaukee Journal Archives

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On April 1, 2010, WisBlawg’s Bonnie Shucha wrote about archived news articles from the Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel being available via Google News. Well, the Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel now offers a search option on their homepage to search archives from 1884 – 2007. The search box is located on the right hand side of the page – look for the following:

The website indicates that the coverage is as follows:

Milwaukee Journal – 1884 to 1995
Milwaukee Sentinel – 1909 to 1995
Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel – 1995 to 2007

It should be noted, however, that the archives do not seem to include ALL articles. For example, during a sample date search I found missing Milwaukee Journal issues in both December 1900 and December 1930.

SEARCHING

The Journal website indicates that the functionality is “powered by Google.” It appears that their engine directly queries Google News. The researcher can search by date or keyword. Once an article is located, just like searching the Google news archive, it must be read online and cannot be printed.

To compare results, I ran the same search in both the Google news archive and the Journal/Sentinel archive engine. My search was “Milwaukee Public Library.” The results were similar but not identical. The first page of Google results included an article from the Milwaukee Business Journal. More significantly, since I placed the “Milwaukee Journal” in the source box of the Google news archive, the results from the Google search lacked the older stories from the Milwaukee Sentinel. Milwaukee natives remember when there were two daily papers. The Sentinel was the morning newspaper, and the Journal was the evening paper. The two combined into the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 1995.

So, which search is better? It is hard to say. The Google news archive allows complex queries, but the Journal engine searches all three newspapers in a single search.

Thanks to my colleagues Diane Duffey and Laura La Rose.