First published on November 1, 1949, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (F.A.Z.) is one of the major national daily newspapers in Germany. The paper publishes Monday to Saturday (the Sunday edition is called the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung [F.A.S.], but both are referred to here as F.A.Z.).

Published by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH, F.A.Z. covers a comprehensive range of topics in Germany and internationally. The publisher notes that “As one of the most important media of the young Federal Republic the F.A.Z., since its very beginnings, has always greatly valued a large network of correspondents.” The four daily sections and inserts of the paper include economic, political, cultural, and science topics.

Aside from the current news website (http://www.faz.net), F.A.Z. offers two archival products that cover the entire previous history of the publication:

• F.A.Z.-BiblioNet contains more than 2 million text-searchable articles of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspapers (daily edition, Sunday edition) from 1993 to the present. The articles are presented in html format, with article-level PDFs available from 2009 to the present. In addition, BiblioNet offers full-page PDFs of the paper from 2000 to the present.
  
  Article feeds (text only) for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung content beginning with 1981 was previously included in the LexisNexis and Factiva databases. However, content was temporarily withdrawn from LexisNexis in 2005, and according to the publisher has not been contributed to either database since 2009, despite still being listed in the contents.¹

   

• F.A.Z. 49-92 contains more than 2.8 million text-searchable articles from the historical archive of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from the founding of the newspaper in 1949 until 1992. This is intended to complete the digitization of the full run of the newspaper. The archive contains the articles in full text and also the articles and pages in facsimile. F.A.Z. 49-92 also includes reports of the “Zeitung für Frankfurt” as well as the “Rhein-Main-Zeitung.”
  
  According to the general terms and conditions of the digital archive, the following are not included in F.A.Z. 49-92: advertisements, business pages that include stock prices (Kursseiten), photos, cartoons, weather reports, events, and publishing supplements. Graphics, if available, are provided (according to this description, graphics are in the HTML version at the end of the page. The full-page PDF version contains all the graphics, photos, and images).

Comment from trial access to the database, June–August 2011:

-- It would be preferable to have the two databases merged into one, to eliminate the artificial separation between the 1949–92 archive and the 1993–present archive.