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The library has a large selection of local, national, and international newspapers that cover the last several hundred years as well as ones that cover more recent decades. Below is guidance on how to find and search these newspaper databases, especially when researching historical topics.

Accessing Newspapers

You can find lists of newspapers in the Primary Sources guide. We have a lot of newspaper databases, so you can read the descriptions under each one to see what publications and scope will be in each database and the time period.

• Historic Newspapers
• Current Newspapers

If you are looking to find and search within a specific newspaper, you can use our Journals A-Z resource from the library homepage.  You can find step-by-step instructions on using this tool in our FAQ: How do I find and access a specific journal, magazine, or newspaper?

Searching for Articles

Most newspaper databases will be full-text searches. This means that the search terms you type in the boxes will be searched anywhere in the article and the database's algorithm will try to rank results based on their relevance.

There are certain techniques you can use in these databases to help you refine these results. Using the popular database, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, let's look at some of these techniques with the example of researching the Titanic.

Advanced Search Techniques

Let's say we first want to search this newspaper database to see what was being discussed about the Titanic when it departed Southampton on its maiden voyage, before it would sink on April 15th. We'll select the Advanced Search option in the database to have more search boxes to mix and match our search terms.

• In the first search box we type Titanic.
  • If we only search this term, we're going to get way too many results.
  • The capitalization of your search terms does not matter. If you have a name that has accents on letters, you don't have to worry about using those accents.

• In the second search box, we add more terms to narrow our search to Titanic the boat.
  • There could be lots of words that might work, so we've got the "OR" operator between our terms. This tells the database that only one of these terms needs to appear to pull an article as a result. We can have lots of synonyms and related terms. You don't have to capitalize "OR" in this database but in some databases you do, so it's good practice to just capitalize it.
  • The phrase "White Star Line" has quotation marks around it.  This keeps these three words together as a phrase.  They must be together to pull the result.

• Lastly, we included the term Southampton, the Titanic's departure city, to help get our results to be more about the departure.  We could try a bunch of other search terms with the "OR" between to help us do this as well.

Proximity Searching

In some newspaper databases, users can use a Proximity Operator to connect their search terms to search them within a certain number of words from each other. Because the search is often full-text and can sometimes include all the text on a page, these proximity connectors can help you refine results. Remember not all databases will have these, and the connector symbol or word may be different in each one.  For ProQuest Historical Newspapers, you can use these proximity connectors:

NEAR/# or N/#

Example: Captain NEAR/4 Smith or Captain N/4 Smith

The words captain and Smith need to be within 4 words of each other.

PRE/# or P/#

Example: Captain PRE/4 Smith or Captain P/4 Smith

The words captain and Smith need to be within 4 words or each other with Captain always coming before Smith.

Publication Date Limiter/Filter

All databases will have a date filter, which allows you to refine your results to works published on a specific date or within a specific date range. We know the Titanic departed Southampton on April 10, 1912. To avoid all the articles about the sinking, we can limit our articles to those published around the time of the departure.

• In the date limiter we've set the range for April 1, 1912 to April 12, 1912.
  • You can use this for longer date ranges or for a specific date. Remember for older articles, coverage might not have been as instantaneous as it is today and may have taken several days to be reported.

Publication Title Limiter/Filter

• There's a publication limiter that allows us to see what newspapers were publishing articles and how many. We have the option to limit our results to those published by a specific newspaper.

Document Type Limiter/Filter

• Some newspaper databases may also provide a limiter for types of sources within a newspaper. This may help you find specific articles, especially more in-depth ones. It's also helpful for researchers looking for certain types of primary sources like advertisements.

Results List Organization

• The default setting on most database is to organize results by relevancy, but in some cases you can change this to other options such as newest and oldest articles first.
• This can be helpful in certain research situations.  For example, if we were curious when Molly Brown received the moniker of the "Unsinkable Molly Brown," we could search that name as a phrase and then organize results by oldest first.

Research Tips for Primary Source Newspaper Research

When researching for people and events using historic newspapers, there's a couple of tips that can help with your research:

1. Give yourself plenty of time! This type of research can be a lot of fun and you can end up going down some wonderful and interesting rabbit holes, but it is often time-consuming. Make sure you have allotted yourself time, so you can do lots of searches and have the time to go through the results.
2. When thinking about the names of events or topics, think of how they would be talked about during the time period the articles were being written.  For example, WWI would not have been discussed as WWI when it was happening.  What other terms might have been used instead?
3. For people, check to see if they used alternative names or had alternative spellings.
4. Have specific dates or time periods in mind.  Use that date limiter as it will really help to hone your search!

Full-Text of Articles

• These newspaper databases will provide the full-text of their articles. This may be presented as the article itself, but in some databases, you may be taken to the entire page of the newspaper and will have to zoom into the specific article.
• Almost all of these databases have scanned their pages, so the quality of the scan may vary greatly.
• For articles from newspapers from several hundred years ago, you may also notice printing conventions such as using a long s. This character looks like an "f" but actually represents one or two s's.