Beginning in 1986, The Times expanded its sports and cultural coverage with the increase of weekend supplements, giving the researcher of today even broader insight into our modern world. The archive supports research across multiple disciplines and areas of interest, including business, humanities, political science, philosophy, and numerous other subjects with coverage of all major international historical events.

The Times is the world's oldest continuously published newspaper. Readers have turned to The Times for its in-depth news coverage, parliamentary reports and commentary, editorial opinion, and unique view of history from the major reporters and editors of the period. The Times Digital Archive allows users to see the complete page of every issue published over parts of four centuries. To facilitate precise searching, each article is assigned to one of twenty-six subcategories within seven main categories, including:

• Advertising—revealing insight into contemporary life
• Editorial & Commentary—covering every conceivable topic
• Business—home markets, continental bourse, money markets, stocks and shares, company news
• People—extensive coverage of births, deaths, marriages, and obituaries
• Features—books, cinema, theater, opera, music, radio, television, sports, weather, bridge, crosswords
• News—from the smallest news item to a story breaking worldwide
• Picture Gallery—photographs, drawings, or any pictorial item not associated with an article

As the most famous English-language newspaper of this period, The Times is a critical resource for studying a range of subjects for the past 239 years. Examples of topics covered:

• Science and technology: The invention of the telephone, the telegraph, a huge number of home appliances, and space exploration, the Internet, mobile phones, cloning
• Geopolitics: The Russian Revolution, the creation of Israel, the end of the Cold War, and the rise of global terrorism
• War: The Crimean War, World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War, the collapse of Yugoslavia, the Gulf Wars, and the conflict in Afghanistan
• Disasters: The sinking of the Titanic, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, genocide in Rwanda, the Boxing Day tsunami, and the Kobe earthquake
• Politics: The civil rights movement, the suffrage movement, the Thatcher-Major-Blair years in the UK, the second Reagan administration, and the George W. Bush presidency
• Sport: Coverage of Olympic games and major sports tournaments, plus controversial sports stories such as Roger Bannister's sub-four minute mile and Ben Johnson's drug-fueled win in Seoul in 1988
• Economics: The Industrial Revolution, the Great Depression, the savings and loan crisis, the growth of China as a financial power, and the Asian banking crisis
• Business: The Industrial Revolution, the dotcom bubble, the rise of Microsoft and Apple
• Culture: The trial of Oscar Wilde, the death of Elvis Presley, the emergence of rock and roll and the "kinema" (later known as cinema), the rise of the paperback book, the Young British Artists movement, and the entry of hip-hop music into mainstream culture

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