Found online # 2 – Newspaper archives

Welsh Newspapers Online
Welsh Newspapers Online

Returning (a little later than planned) to this occasional series on useful online resources, here’s a listing of newspaper archives. I happen to work at one of the world’s largest newspaper archives, where we have digitised some 14 million pages on the British Newspaper Archive, with many more millions to come. But this is a listing of other people’s online historical newspaper resources – some renowned, some unusual, all of them warmly recommended – and all of them free to use, by the way.

  • Trove – The National Library of Australia’s outstanding online database is primarily a digital newspaper service, an inspiration to all in the digital humanities the world over, and now sadly at risk because the funding is running out
  • Chronicling America – The Library of Congress provides access to millions of American newspapers pre-1923 i.e. the period before US copyright restrictions). See also the LoC’s Historic Newspapers Flickr site
  • US News Map – A visualisation tool for Chronicling America, created by the Georgia Research Tech Institute, showing search results across time and individual US states
  • Europeana – The European Union’s would-be answer to Google is a tremendous portal into the cultural collections of Europe, though you do have to speak 20 languages to get the best of out it. No English newspapers, though – but plenty of Welsh titles (in English, mostly). The Europeana Newspapers project site has interesting background information, with free and open source tools
  • Papers Past – The National Library of New Zealand’s database of newspapers, magazines, journals, letters, journals and diaries is one of the best of all digital resources, not just those for newspapers
  • History Unfolded: US Newspapers and the Holocaust – American crowdsourcing project inviting people across the country to identify local newspaper reports on the Holocaust (note that the site does not include any digitised articles)
  • Gallica – The Bibliothèque nationale de France vast digital library (of both free and restricted material) has many digitised newspapers (under ‘La presse et les revues’ – it will help know some French)
  • The Handwritten Newspapers Project – A quite wonderful academic project blog, tracing the unexpectedly rich history of the handwritten newspaper, from 59 B.C. onwards
  • Nineteenth Century Serials Edition – Humble but free, six nineteenth-century British periodical and newspaper titles available from this King’s College London project
  • The Gazette – Britain’s oldest continuous newspapers started in 1665 as The Oxford Gazette, soon becoming The London Gazette, and is available online in its entirety (it’s an official journal giving statutory notices rather than conventional news)
  • Newspapers SG Digitised historic newspapers from Singapore and Malaya, 1836-2006 (though only older material can be seen online). The titles are in either English, Chinese or Malay
  • Welsh Newspapers Online – Model digital newspaper site from National Library of Wales, with 1.1 million pages ranging from 1804 to 1919
  • New York Times Article Archive – The NYT’s article archive from 1851 used to be free fore anything pre-1923, but now non-subscribers get access to 10 articles per month, pre-1923 and post-1980. So either subscribe or stagger your searches
  • Old Fulton New York Postcards – Charmingly low-tech, a private collection of digitised New York newspapers, which boasts over 35,000,000 pages
  • ICON – The International Coalition on Newspapers’ database of (mostly American) newspaper archive holdings is pitched more at librarians than researchers, but is fascinating once you get into it. It also provides a very helpful listing of past, present, and prospective digitization projects of historic newspapers
  • onlinenewspapers.com – A great guide to current newspaper sites across the world, many of which will have back archives for recent years freely available
  • List of Newspapers – Alternatively, try this plainly-designed service which claims to be the largest directory of online newspapers from around the world
  • Elephind – Amazing search tool collating results from different newspaper archives (inc Trove, Papers Past and Chronicling America) – it currently boasts 149,363,907 items from 2,779 newspaper titles

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