SCELC Vendor Day 2008: About Keesing's World News Archive
Keesing's World News Archive: News upon which you can rely
Founded in 1931, Keesing's is a trusted world news digest upon which experts on international affairs from around the world rely to establish objective, historical facts concerning world events. Each month from our office in Cambridge, UK, we write and publish Keesing's Record of World Events, the successor to the weekly Keesing's Contemporary Archives. The Keesing's archive comprises the full text of these two consecutive reference series, more than 98,000 articles written over the last 77 years accurately recording political, social and economic events from every part of the world.
Keesing's differs from even the most authoritative newspaper repository in that, since 1931, our mission has been to create an archive of cross-referenced articles, written to the highest standards of accuracy, which records for posterity the world's major political, social and economic events. Newspapers have a mission to print those stories which will capture the public's interest on a particular day and, in so doing, will sell more copies than their rivals. They are ephemeral by definition: their obsolescence is integral to their function and hence they are disposed of, or recycled, at the end of each day. By contrast, nobody ever throws away an issue of Keesing's because our archive is written for the historical record. Keesing's neither pushes a political agenda nor seeks short-term sales. Unlike newspapers and news magazines, Keesing's articles strive for permanence and are written to be used by future historians and students alike.
Extensive use of cross-references and thoroughly tagged and indexed articles means that Keesing's not only presents researchers with an accurate summary of distilled facts and events, it also offers them the means to explore the connections between events by providing a rich and detailed historical context. Online access to Keesing's World News Archive enables researchers to quickly assemble timelines and click through cross-reference links to discover relationships amongst events, people and nations. Users can also quickly narrow results using our advanced search, filtering and clustering tools. Finally, users have the ability to interact with the Keesing's community of users by assigning tags to articles. These tags can then be used to identify and cluster search results.
Our robust research interface also provides users with the ability to make private research notes and to save articles to a private portfolio. This empowers subscribers to create their own personal current affairs database in parallel to the Keesing's archive as well as to share research findings.