History @ CUL

Accessing Digitized Newspapers

The digitization of old newspapers is transforming their value as source material.  It is now possible to search across millions of pages of scanned and OCRed papers.  There are free resources, such as Chronicling America from the Library of Congress and the Fulton County history site (which provides access to an incredible 25 million pages of scanned NY papers).  And there are commercial products ranging from The New York Times and Washington Post from ProQuest to America’s Historical Newspapers from Readex. There is a Cornell guide to digitized newspapers that provides an overview of what is available.

The Library subscribes to as many of the commercial resources as we can, but they often are very expensive.  What can you do if the paper you are interested in is not available through Cornell?

An option may be to use a newspaper product from a genealogical publisher.  For a reasonable fee (often as low as $80/year), they can provide access to hundreds of titles that we do not own.  Here are three examples:

• Newspapers.com is a new database from Ancestry, the company that produces the Ancestry.com database to which the library currently subscribes.  Newspapers.com currently has over 800 papers and 25 million pages.  Newspapers supposedly date from the 1700s into the 2000s.
• GenealogyBank.com from NewsBank, one of the Library’s sources for contemporary online news, claims to have over 6,400 newspapers available for searching. Because NewsBank also owns Readex, this may be a source for papers in series in America’s Historical Newspapers to which the Library does not subscribe.
• For UK papers, the genealogy site Findmypast.co.uk has added 200 UK newspaper titles published between 1710 and 1950.  These are produced in conjunction with the British Library.

In most cases, these sites have limited free searching.  Since these are intended primarily for the genealogical community, searching is often by name.  Nevertheless, the full content of the paper is usually included.  And these services often offer a free trial period.  If they have the papers from an area of interest to you, it could be an affordable research expenditure.

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