[Online] Motorsport Magazine archives - online now.

[Knowlesy]

Just a heads up for anyone unaware, the Motorsport Magazine online archive is now available for subscribers. Every issue is up there ready to be browsed.

http://archive.motorsportmagazine.com/issues

It isn't perfect at the moment, there is clearly a bit of editing needed in places where the articles have been scanned and converted. But you can zoom into original full page scans anyways, so that negates that particular problem.

If you aren't a subscriber, I think you can pay a small price for archive access.

Thankyou Motorsport. Just need Autosport to do this now.

[Adam43]

Got the email, but haven't checked it out. Great idea, great stuff. Makes up for Mark Hughes, just.

[nicanary]

The first 3 months are free - after that there will be a charge, but I'm not sure whether this applies to MS subscribers.

(PS I tried it this morning to investigate an obscure FJ car - it gave me 3 articles from past issues, none of which had anything to do with, nor mentioned, the car in question. Hmmm...)

[Knowlesy]

Yeah, I find the search function quite hit and miss.

There is certainly a lot of refinement needed. But at least all the issue are up there to access, which is a decent starting point!

[gts300]

I wonder if the revenue from the advertisements will be sufficient to maintain free access?

[isynge]

I've been nosing around the archive for the last couple of weeks, and while it's not without a wrinkle or two, it's still much more usable than the big, never read, stack of archive magazines in the shed, especially when one feels like perusing an issue or a subject over lunch at work.

Of course there are scanning problems, and I suspect this lies at the root of some of the search issues, but there are gratifying little notes such as the "seen a problem" on this page function, which I guess crowd sources error trapping.

Of most interest is the fact that it serves to remind us that people have always found something to moan about - reading DSJ's opinion on the 1970 Le Mans 24 Hours - that it was a dead loss because the run across the track was gone - in particular raised a smile.

[crooky]

This is an amazing resource and something I can see me looking at a lot but it does seem a bit fiddly personally. Like scrolling through the actual scan of the article on a laptop seems very tricky.

I've tried on my iPad as well though and had more luck. On an article if you select the text in the scan as you know it shows the text to the left sans pictures but it also shows the whole article in scanned form as well. With the iPad in portrait mode and selecting the zoom page option you get the whole article that's easily scrollable but not easily readable so the last step is to double tap the screen with 3 fingers whereby you can zoom it to a readable size.

Now it's actually an easy read with all the lovely pictures included.