In the absence of a complete set of drafting materials (whether official or unofficial) available to the public, news coverage of the meetings during the drafting process provides another window into the Basic Law's drafting history. The News Coverage database contains English language newspaper articles reporting on the various meetings of the Basic Law Drafting Committee (BLDC) and Basic Law Consultative Committee (BLCC) from 1985 to 1990. The newspaper cuttings are taken from Dr Norman Miners' collection which is accessible from the HKUL's Hong Kong Newspaper Clippings Online. The Search function allows full-text searching of the contents and meta-data of each article, and also searching in the title, author and document number fields. Advanced searching can narrow the pool of articles to be searched by official body, document type, newspaper and/or date(s). The useful Browse function allows users to browse for articles by month and year in respect of each of the individual BLDC and BLCC sub-groups. Search results appear in chronological order by document date.