Overview of online newspaper archives
Millions of pages of newspaper and magazine archives from the world press are available online. These archives, some dating back to the mid 1600's, are a rich resource for anyone with an interest in history, and are typically used to research family history, for academic, journalistic and professional research, or merely to satisfy one's curiosity about life in bygone days.
Digital archives generally take three forms:
- Text-only archives, containing article text but no images
- Image-only archives, showing actual article or full page images as they appeared in print, but with no capability to search actual text of articles, and
- Image & text archives, which display actual article and page images, and also have underlying text files which allow full-text searching for terms of interest.
Other archive features to be aware of include:
- Content. Some archives include the full publication (articles, advertisements, editorials, etc), some include articles only, and some only contain select materials.
- Search capability. Even at full text archives, search capabilities vary widely, such as the ability (or lack thereof) to search only on headlines, or only for front page articles. Use of search tools like wildcards and proximity searching also varies widely. Many archives have only limited capabilities, allowing searching on headlines, or keywords, but not on article text.
- Continuity. Archives can contain a full and complete record of a newspaper, but are often marked by gaps in the record.
- Format. There are many ways to display page images, some more convenient than others. Archives with certain capabilities -- allowing images to be downloaded as PDFs, highlighting search terms within a page or article, and allowing further text searching within a document once it is retrieved -- are much more valuable as historical tools than archives without these features.
- Cost and Access. In the spirit of making information available to the most users possible, the best archives are those that are free,. There are also many fee-based archives. Some provide access on a per-article basis, while others require a full subscription to the archive. These latter are usually aimed at institutional libraries and are, unfortunately, unavailable to the great number of internet users.
Google News Archives -- The Meta-Archive
Many people use Google News to look for current news articles, but fewer seem to be aware of the deep resource available at Google News Archives. This is certainly the largest and most comprehensive archive of historical news available on the internet at no charge, and may well be the largest even including subscription services.
Google News Archives is a meta-archive -- a compilation of a great number of individual archives, many of which are very substantial in their own right. Included in Google News Archives are individual newspapers like the New York Times, as well as broad collections like newspaperarchive.com and ProQuest Archiver. Overall coverage includes the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Atlanta Constitution, Washington Post and the Boston Globe, just to name a few. Non-US publications (Le Monde, Times of London) and magazines (Atlantic Monthly, Time Magazine) are included as well.
Google News Archives integrates results from both free and fee-based sources. As a result, not all search results are fully available without charge. However, the great virtue of this resource is that it covers an enormous amount of historical content, and provides the powerful but familiar Google search interface. Searches can be narrowed to specific sources, dates or languages with the Advanced Search feature.
Google News Archives is generally an excellent first stop for any historical news research. One caveat though: Google News Archives do not always return the same results as the original archive that they access. If one is searching for hard to find materials, it pays to search directly from the appropriate original archive after first attempting the search at Google.
Other Major Archives
Newspaperarchive.com is a subscription site hosting almost a billion newspaper articles. Coverage extends back to 1759, and includes papers from 13 countries, although the great bulk of content is from the US, and generally from smaller papers. Subscriptions are (at the time of this writing) $75.88 per year. "Special Collections" content at newspaperarchive.com is available for free. In my opinion, NewspaperArchives.com is, by far, the best newspaper archive service available.
SmallTownPapers.com is a free site with a growing collection of US newspapers. Coverage extends back to 1865. Search capabilities are awkward, but will hopefully be improved in the future.
Archives from the New York Times, one of the world's leading newspapers, are available online from 1851- present, and offers much of its content for free. This is a wonderful, but strangely designed collection. Content from 1851-1980 is available as actual article images, while more recent content is text-only. Articles from 1851-1922 and from 1981-present are available for free, but there is a charge of $3.95 for articles from other dates. Go figure!
Time Magazine archives are also online, 1923-present, free of charge, as text only documents, though Time magazine covers are available as full images.
There are several major archives that are largely available through institutional subscriptions, chiefly at public, university or corporate libraries. These include:
- Proquest is probably the largest and richest source of major archived publications. They offer a variety of subscription products with broad international coverage. Proquest Historical Newspapers is one of their premier products.
- Lexis-Nexis and Factiva both include extensive archives from the world press dating back to roughly the 1970's. Lexis-Nexis has several pay-as-you-go plans where you can access archives without a subscription for about $3 per article.
- NewsBank/Readex has a large collection of Americana.
Newspaper and Magazine Archive Directories and Portals
There are various directories of web-accessible newspaper and magazine archives:
XooxleAnswers.com is my favorite (for good reason...it's my site). The archives directory lists hundreds of free newspaper archives sites from around the world, and is perhaps the most comprehensive list available. It includes:
- US state, regional and local newspaper archives
- International newspaper archives from more than 25 countries, and a dozen languages.
- Magazine archives, chiefly from the US, although some UK archives are listed as well.
- College newspapers from Cornell, Harvard, Penn State and elsewhere.
FreeNewspaperArchives.us concentrates on free materials available from the U.S., focusing on a region by region listing of free newspaper archives.
Wikipedia has an excellent newspaper archives list of both free and fee sites. The University of Illinois also has a good list.
The International Coaltion on Newspapers (ICON) has an interesting list that appears to be well-maintained.
For newspaper archives in the United Kingdom, the Knol: Newspapers - Genealogical Resources for the Family History Researcher is recommended, and there's a nice article at Quezi.com on this as well.
Alberto Auné
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A legacy for the future generations
This knol introduces us in this theme. It encourages us to investigate and know the true about the facts in our world and society.
Is a very good introduction in this theme.
All we live in other countries from USA must know about these archives in our countries.
Alberto Auné
P V Ariel
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Online Newspaper Archives
I am available here at this link: http://knol.google.c
http://www.pvariel.b
Histo
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Nice article
http://delicious.com
Boze Kater is niet gek
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