Complete New Yorker Offers 80 Years of Insight into American Life

Magazine Now Poised for Growth in a Digital Age

Challenge

Since its first issue in February 1925, The New Yorker has evolved from a publication into a cultural monument. Its prize-winning cartoons, fiction and non-fiction essays, profiles and even advertisements offer a goldmine of information about historical current events as recorded by writers, editors and illustrators.

Upon the publication’s 80th anniversary, the magazine’s publishers created an eight DVD set of the book, along with a companion book of highlights. A key part of this endeavor was to offer a fully searchable version, one that readers could look through for commentary on social issues, rendering it an invaluable tool for researchers and reinforcing The New Yorker’s standing as an innovative publication covering political, social and artistic trends.

In producing a weekly publication over 80 years, however, The New Yorker had amassed 4,109 issues, containing a half-million pages of content. To provide the best view of the content, it was important to present it in its original context by faithfully reproducing each page of each issue in PDF format. While this would provide high quality images of the pages, the format would result in dozens of compact disks of data that would be too difficult to search...