CFI Blogs

[Last updated: 13 December 2011]

A further slew of dusty old newspapers has been digitised and made available online, and that bit of news prompts me to cull the best of the new content and combine them with with some older links to create the beginnings of a more comprehensive list of useful resources. By useful, I mean larger major-language newspapers or multiple-title archives, mostly, that are searchable and can be accessed privately online - anything, essentially, that looked beyond the narrow purview of small-town doings and local politics for its news. Many are paysites, but of these, almost all will allow free searches, so at least you can find out if they hold enough useful material to make paying worthwhile.

This information is scattered all over the web at present, and the signal-to-noise ratio is such that it's increasingly difficult to distinguish the useless from the useful, and - in some cases - to locate the most important links. In order to avoid littering this blog with my own scattering of occasional discoveries, I also plan to add future finds to this list, and will keep this entry updated with any changes in web address as I become aware of them. If you use digital archives on a regular basis, in short, you may find it worth bookmarking this entry.

Rules of the game: titles are listed alphabetically by country with the exception of British titles, which are listed alphabetically by newspaper title, and state-specific US titles, which are listed by state.

• Afghanistan Digital Library. Some newspapers, more books from the period 1870-1930. Hosted by New York University. A good chance to practice your Pushtu.

• Alaska's Tundra Times 1962-1997. By and for the Inuit community.

• Arizona Casa Grande Newspaper Project 1912-present. 

• Atlanta Constitition 1868-1945. Paysite.

• Historic Australian Newspapers 1803-1954. 30+ titles covering all states. An impressive, ever-growing archive.

• Australian Periodical Publications 1840-1845. Nearly 100 titles, most having only short runs, but including the Sydney Free Press and Commercial Journal (1835-41), the South Australian News (1840-52) and the Maitland Mercury (1843-55).

• Baltimore Sun 1837-1945 and 1990-present. Paysite.

• Belgian Press. Digitising 3 million pages of all the Low Countries news that was fit to print between 1831-1950. Six titles available at time of writing.

• Boston Globe 1872-1926. Paysite.

• Brooklyn Daily Eagle 1841-1902.

• British Newspapers 1800-1900. 200 local and national titles, totalling in excess of 3 million pages. Growing constantly. Freshly available online to registered users of the British Library. Paysite. Choose from annual subscription at £79.95, 30 day/3000 Credit Package costing £29.95 or 2 day/500 Credit Package at £6.95.

• California Digital Newspapers 1849-1911. Includes LA Herald, Daily Alta California and San Francisco Call.

• Canadian newspapers online include the British Colonist (Vancouver) 1858-1910;the British Columbia newspaper archives (1926-present); the official Canada Gazette, 1841-1997, the Canada Maritime newspaper archives (getting started in a small way; will include Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick); Manitoba newspaper archives 1859-present, Early Alberta newspapers (browseable but not yet text-searchable), the Halton Newspaper Index (Ontario; from 1950s), Prince George newspapers, 1909-61, and the Winnipeg Free Press (1878-present). The largest Canadian archive, for the Toronto Star, already has a separate entry below.

• Caribbean newspaper digital library. About three dozen titles, from the Abaco Account to the Windward Islands Opinion. Mostly shortish runs; numerous rarities (for which read extremely specialist interest).

• Chicago Tribune 1852-present. Paysite.

• Christian Science Monitor 1908-80. Paysite.

• Chronicling America 1880-1910. About 50 out-of-copyright titles hosted by the Library of Congress. Major papers include the New York Tribune, New York Sun, the legendary Charles Chapin's brilliant but 'yellow' Evening World, and the San Francisco Call. Further decades and many more papers will follow.

• Colorado Historic Newspapers 1859-1930. About 50 small-town Colorado newspapers, including four from Denver.

• Columbus Enquirer 1828-1890. Georgia newspaper.

• Daily Express 1900-present, Sunday Express 2000-present. British titles, once establishment, now definitely not so. The site has also begun to feature packages, starting with one on World War II (1933-45), which include regional papers and specialist press. Paysite.

• Daily Mail. Not yet fully archived, but runs searches back to 1993.

• Daily Mirror 1903-present. British popular daily. Paysite.

• Daily Telegraph.  Not yet fully archived, but runs searches back to 1998.

• Dallas Morning News 1885-1977. Paysite.

• Detroit Free Press 1831-1922, 1999-present. Paysite.

• Financial Times. From 1888. Paysite. Only accessible via libraries.

• Florida Digital Newspaper Library. 1762-present. Since there were essentially no Florida papers prior to the 1820s, includes out-of-state content relevant to Florida.

* French digital newspapers. Gallica - la presse quotidienne, the digital library of teh Bibliotheque Nationale, hosts a variety of 19th and 20th century French newspapers, including Le Figaro (1830-1942), Le Temps (1861-1935), Le Petit Journal (1863-1944), Le Petit Parisien (1876-1944) and La Presse (1836-1858).

• Internet Library of Early Journals. Mostly 18th century. Long runs of the Annual Register, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, The Gentleman’s Magazine, Notes & Queries and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. 

• Georgia Historic Newspapers 1750-1925. Three local papers.

• German digital newspapers include Munich's Illustrierter Sontag and Der Gerade Weg (1929-34) [in German].

• Google News Archive 1700s-present. Dozens of papers, a few big, most small; some free, some links leading to paysites.

• Google's list of newspapers in its archive. Arranged alphabetically, with details of the dates available. Enormous listing, mostly English, some French, a scattering of other languages.

• Guardian and Observer archive 1790-present. Paysite. Supports only Internet Explorer or Netscape browsers. Searches for the period from 1999 are free.

• Hartford Courant 1764-present. Paysite. America's oldest surviving newspaper.

• Icelandic newspapers 1773-2001. Also covers Greeland, Faroe Islands. In Icelandic.

• Illinois Digital Archives. Multiple resources including The Flora Journal-Record 1883-1926. Cumbersome search function.

• Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection. At present essentially just the Urbana Daily Courier 1903-1935.

• The Independent. Primitive search function.

• Indianapolis Star 1903-1922, 1991-present. Paysite.

• Iowa's Adams County Free Press 1876-2000.

• Iowa's Buffalo Center Globe and Tribune 1894-2007. Excludes papers published from 1898-1910. Hosted by NewspaperArchive; hence a paysite.

• Iowa's Cedar Rapids Newspaper Project 1857-present. About 50 papers, most from from Cedar Rapids and Des Moines.

• Iowa's Sioux County Newspaper Archives 1872-present. More than 20 smalltown titles.

• Irish Newspaper Archives Project 1700s-present. 20 titles. Paysite. Difficult to access privately.

• The Irish Times 1859-present. Paysite.

• Kansas City Star 1991-present. Paysite.

• The Listener, 1929-1991. The BBC weekly published a large quantity of noteworth analysis and criticism, often only tenuously linked to the news and indeed to the Beeb itself. Paysite, only accessible via reference libraries.

• The London, Edinburgh and Belfast Gazettes. Official British government newspaper. To call these "dry" is a considerable understatement, but good for lists of awards, medals, bankruptcies and sundry other announcements. "Published by Authority."

• Los Angeles Times 1881-present. Paysite.

• Macon Telegraph 1826-1908. Georgia newspaper.

• Making of America. 22 19th century journals, including Scientific American, Putnam's, Scribner's and Harper's, hosted by Cornell University. The same site has links to 260+ C19th monographs.

* Malaysian and Singaporean newspapers 1831-2006. In English. NewspaperSG, hosted by the National Library of Singapore, includes the archives of the New Straits Times 1845-1989.

• Miami Herald 1911-1922 and 1981-present. Paysites.

• Midgeville Digital Newspapers. Three small Georgia titles.

• Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel 1884-2007.

• Minneapolis Star Tribune 1986-present. Paysite.

• New Jersey's Atlantic County Digitized Newspapers 1860-1923. About 20 titles, mostly with short runs.

• News Library, 1977-present. Compiles full and partial runs of 3877 mostly US, mostly local, titles; also transcripts from a number of talk radio stations (list here). From the Advocate of Westminster and Finksburg to Newsweek.

• NewspaperArchive.com. A huge number of mostly obscure, mostly 20th century, mostly local papers - most from the US. Paysite. Among hundreds of others, I note the Lubbock Morning Avalanche, Oakland Tribune, Salt Lake Tribune and San Antonio Light.

• New Orleans Bee/L’Abeille
de la Nouvelle-Orléans, 1827-1925. English/French 1827-72; French-only after 1872. No search function – you must already know the issue you want, or face a protracted manual search. But it's free.

• New York Historical Newspapers - small town upstate titles. Warning: barely-adequate title-by-title search, and no general search function.

• Old New York State Newspapers, 1817-2007. A bit of an oddity, this one: the "Old Fulton NY Post Card Website" boasts more than 10 million pages of vintage newspapers on an ugly but perfectly functional site with a pretty good search engine. The site extracts single page pdfs from its database, and it can be difficult to track pages back to the paper they came from if the text doesn't happen to carry the necessary information. The site FAQ contains the tip you need to sort this out.

• New York State's Historic Suffolk Newspapers 1839-present. Coverage of Long Island.

• New York Times 1855-present. Paysite, but pre-1923 coverage is now free. For those wondering why the date 1922 and 1923 appear so frequently in this list, '23 is the date before which copyright no longer applies in the US.

• New Zealand Papers Past 1839-1952. 52 titles. Much improved search function.

• Newsbank. 2,665 titles, mostly covering only the last decade. Paysite.

• Notes and Queries. The venerable British antiquarian journal, founded in 1849, has, over the years, covered an astonishing array of Fortean phenomena. Paysite. About half the copies of Devon & Cornwall Notes & Queries for 1900-1921 are available on a free site. The Guardian's watered-down version – a weekly column in the daily paper, established 1989 and still going strong – is far more ephemeral, vastly more lighthearted, but also occsaionally useful.

• Daily Oklahoman 1901-present. Paysite.

• Pennsylvania's Lancaster County Digitization Project 1816-2005. Lots of papers, clumsy searching.

• Philadelphia Inquirer 1829-1922. Hosted on a genealogy site. Paysite.

• Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News. 1829-1922 1978-present.

• Portland Oregonian 1851-1987.

• Providence Journal 1983-present. Rhode Island paper

• Sacramento Bee 1984-present. Paysite.

• San Francisco Chronicle 1995-present. 

• Savannah Morning News 1990-2000 (paysite); 1998-present (free).

• The Scotsman 1817-1950. Paysite.

• Nineteenth century Scottish highland newspapers. Inverness Journal, Advertiser and a few Couriers, Scottish Highlander,  John O'Groat Journal, collectively covering 1807-1939.

• South Florida Sun Sentinel 1985-present. Paysite.

• The Sun. British tabloid. Free archive goes back to about 2005.

* Time. A full, free archive of the American newsweekly for the whole of its run, 1923-present.

• The Times 1785-present. Paysite. Searches for the period from 2000 are free.

• Tibet Mirror. Cyclostyled. Remarkable. 67 issues from 1933-1967. In Tibetan, obviously. Digitised and hosted by Columbia University.

• Toronto Star 1894-present. Paysite.

• United States newspapers 1690-1980. Patchy coverage of all US states on a genealogical website. Can also be searched state by state or paper by paper. A list of titles archived and dates covered is available. Paysite.

• Utah Digital Newspapers 1892-1947. Five titles including the Deseret News, 1905-10 and Salt Lake Herald, 1908-10. Most useful is the Ogden Standard Examiner, a newspaper that carried extensive wire coverage of other parts of the US.

• Washington Post 1877-present. Paysite.

• Washington State Historical Newsapers 1852-92. 21 mixed, smaller titles.

• Winona Newspaper Project 1855-1946. The Winona Daily Republican - and, to a much leser extent, its sister titles – was a small-town Wisconsin daily that carried huge amounts of wire news.

• World Newspaper Archive. All right, an excercise in press-your-nose-to-the-window frustration - host ReadEx doesn't deign to sell access to mere users - and the collection is limited to works iin-copyright in the United States. But the coverage is of areas unrepresented elsewhere, and this is at least an opportunity to take notes of what's available via major research libraries. Sometimes the answer is: "Disappointingly little" (was there really any point in digitising just two issues of Bucharest's Rumanischer Lloyd?), but still... lots of pages, and lots and lots more to come.

The main collections are:

• African newspapers 1800-1922

• East European newspapers 1835-1922

• Latin American newspapers 1805-1922

• Latin American newspapers, series 2 1805-1922

• South Asian newspapers 1805-1922

• Wyoming Newspaper Project. Well over a hundred small papers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Other places keep lists like this one, and since I don't often have time to scour the world's net links for new additions  to this archive, you may find news of new sources I have yet to stumble across in one or more of these:

• British Columbia Digital Library. Includes a wide listing of numerous archives, many in languages other than English.

• Full list of other sites worldwide, maintained at Wikipedia.