More than 30 years ago Newspaper Archive Developments, a predecessor company of Primary Source Media, was founded to preserve on microfilm previous and current issues of The Times and its Supplements. To this task was soon added the full indexing of contemporary issues and – what has become an essential component of this ‘TLS’ Centenary Archive – the retrospective indexing of the complete run of The Times Literary Supplement from its first publication in 1902. Printed in several volumes in the 1980s, the TLS Index 1902-1985, with subsequent annual updates, has served as a separate but essential access tool to the TLS in both its paper and microform formats.

In this ‘TLS’ Centenary Archive the paper and its Index are integrated for the first time, presenting new opportunities for study and research wherever scholar or student has access to the Internet. From the Article search screen, users may move quickly to reviews in the image format and full-page context in which they were originally published, illuminating with unprecedented ease how the key writings of our century were received on first publication.

Who contributed what reviews, what else they wrote for the paper, and a biographical sketch of each contributor, is all new information now available for the first time. Jeremy Treglown and Deborah McVea have undertaken the great continuing task which adds thousands of reviews and commentaries to the known corpus of both well-and-lesser-known 20^th Century writers.

This current release of the archive covers the period 1902-1990; subsequent releases will expand complete coverage to 1994 by the end of this year. At that point, the complete run of the TLS to 1994 will be searchable, with remaining additions to the Contributor’s database being completed by the end of 2001.