ProQuest Historical Newspapers includes archival material from major newspapers including the New York Times and Washington Post. This archive is a vast reservoir of primary source material that provides contemporary news coverage dating back to the mid-19th century. It provides images of the actual news articles and is searchable. The user can search a specific date, before or after a specific date, or can specifiy a range of dates. Advance searches are also possible for users looking for specific articles. (However, the archive does not highlight items within articles so it is necessary to read entire articles to locate specific items.) It is surely possible to access such material using micro-film but the ease of searching ProQuest from a personal computer makes it an invaluable tool for any historian seeking contemporary accounts and commentary.
(It is interesting that photographs are not included in this archive. Each article ends with the statement "Reproduced with the permission of the copywrite owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission." So apparently it is permissible to quote from the articles but using the images of the articles themselves is not allowed.)
Since my project focuses on the Kennedy-Nixon "Great Debates," this archive will be helpful in providing newspaper accounts of the negotiations between the candidates regarding the "rules" of the debates (sounds familiar) and accounts and commentary regarding the actual debates themselves as well as the presidential campaign. The fact that the newspaper assessments of the candidates' debate performances (Nixon and Kennedy tied but Kennedy looked more robust) squares with the historical judgement is worth noting.
The availability of archives such as this one would seem to render the job of the historian both easier and harder. The historian's task perhaps becomes easier because primary source material, such as that which is available in ProQuest, is so much more accessible in the digital era. At the same time the sheer accessibility of enormous amounts of historic material means that historians are faced with the task of sifting through that material to determine what is or is not salient. If, for example, someone wanted to write a book on the legal travails of the tobacco industry, the good news is that there is a digital archive, "Legacy Tobacco Documents Library." The bad news is that the "library" consists of more than 38 million pages of tobacco industry documents!