CFI Blogs

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 English-language newspapers or multiple-title archives 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. And, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, I'll explain a nifty trick for getting unrestricted access to the biggest of the pay sites at a bargain $20 a year.

• 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.

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

• Boston Globe 1872-1926. Paysite.

• Brooklyn Daily Eagle 1841-1902.

• British Newspapers 1800-1900. 49 local and national titles, totalling in excess of 2 million pages. Freshly available online to registered users of the British Library. Paysite. Option of 24 hour pass and 100 downloads or 7-day pass and 200 downloads.

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

• Chicago Tribune 1852-present. 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. 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• Los Angeles Times 1881-present. Paysite.

• Macon Telegraph 1826-1908. Georgia newspaper.

• Midgeville Digital Newspapers. Three small Georgia titles.

• Minneapolis Star Tribune 1986-present. Paysite.

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

• 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 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.

• Portland Oregonian 1851-1987.

• Sacramento Bee 1984-present. Paysite.

• The Scotsman 1817-1950. Paysite.

• South Florida Sun Sentinel 1985-present. Paysite.

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

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

• 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.

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

Now, readers of this blog will know that the cost of accessing material from the various paysites on the list can be pretty steep. Most US sites offer 'packs' of articles rather than allowing users to download as much as they like for the duration of their membership, which can can easily mean you find yourself paying $1-$3 for each of dozens of articles. One option for avoiding these charges is to make downloads from public libraries that subscribe to the main news services, but even libraries make charges for print-outs - the British Library, for instance, currently makes users pay 20p per sheet. University students and academics, it's true, can increasingly access the same services from home, logging in remotely using an ATHENS password or similar, and hence avoid all cost, and the same services are now beginning to be offered to ordinary library users in the States. California residents, for instance, can use their library cards to log in remotely to state reference libraries and access newspaper archives in that way.

That's an option hitherto denied those of us who are neither American nor in full-time education, but now - praise be - at least one US library has proved itself willing to sell membership not only to users from out of town and out of state, but even those who live overseas. There are probably others, but (and my thanks here go to the keen history buffs of the baseball-fever.com forum, who first drew my attention the ploy), the Mid-Continent Public Library, in Lee's Summit, Missouri, seems to be the one that offers the widest range of digital services, not least full access to the ProQuest suite of digitised papers, which includes the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Atlanta Constitution, Boston Post and more than a dozen other titles.

There is one snag: the library accepts only checks, which means you'll need either a US checking account or an American friend or relative who has one to take advantage of the scheme. If you are in a position to send $20 in US funds, however, the Mid-Continent will issue you with a reader number that permits you to log in to their library remotely and download as much material as you like from some of the largest and most valuable newspaper sites in the country at no additional cost.

Contact is through the genealogy section of the library in the first instance. Email

ge@mcpl.lib.mo.us

and ask them to send an application form to your US contact. Get that person to fill out the form and return it, with a $20 check; in return they'll receive a library card with a unique user number that you can use to log on to the site.

For anyone who makes regular use of American newspaper archive paysites, this is quite fantastic news.