Articles on Jack Benny

[krledu]

I was just recently at our library and found this cool website that is an archive of magazine, book and newspapers articles. You can look up just about any subject and find something on it. Its called INSPIRE. You can find it at www.inspire.net. I looked up Jack Benny just out of curiousity. I found some interesting things but you sometimes have to wade through to find it. I even found a Saturday evening post from 1948 on there about Jack Benny. A lot of this stuff is old hat if you know a lot about Benny but I did find some interesting tidbits. I haven't gone through everything on there but there are some book reviews of books about him, newspaper articles, and a few magazine articles.

Another article I found on there was from 1963 Saturday Evening post and it kinda made me upset. It was interview done with Jack and it made it sound like he was a sad washed up old man. I found so many facinating things on this site.

[JohnM]

"Only Indiana residents are eligible for INSPIRE database access."

Did it have the full text of the articles? Images of the actual magzine pages? If so, that's a nice perk for living in Indiana!

[krledu]

Thats to bad. Yes it did have full text articles. It showed the pictures from the articles and everything. One of the articles I found was one that Jack referenced on one of his programs from 1958. I will try to get copies of those articles and make them available. They are very interesting. I love looking at the old newspaper and magizine articles from that era.

[krledu]

I have the articles from this database saved onto my computer. Does anyone know how I can I post them so that people can access them via the internet. They are interesting articles but anyone outside of Indiana can't get into this database.

[JohnM]

Well, the state library system probably pays a hefty licensing fee out of tax payer funds to provide access to a valuable, fee-based service like that to millions of people, which explains the limitations on subscribing. It probably goes against their terms of use to share that stuff widely.

If there are particularly good articles, you could cite the source, date, page, title, etc., and anyone interested could try their own libraries (public or university) to see if they have them in digital or hard copy.

(When I was in college in the 80s, my large college library had stacks of bound, original periodicals going back to the 1930s - many were falling apart, and I wouldn't be surprised if these were no longer accessible to the public - but digitization has probably been done both at the library level and by database publishers.) I'm a former librarian - any current librarian would have much better knowledge of this area.

[krledu]

Well, I have three articles that are from the Saturday Evening Post which I know you can find in a library. I want people to see them. I am not publishing them, I just want to post them here. I just want to know how.