Newspaper articles and news programmes can provide useful information about historical and current events. Using news articles as primary sources can allow you to:
See how people viewed an event when it happened
Examine an issue in the context of its time
Trace the historical development of a subject over time
Because newspapers sometimes contain commentaries or retrospective articles about events, they can also be classed as secondary sources.
You can use the links below to search the news sources to which the library subscribes.
Provides news from over 2000 global sources - including UK national and regional newspapers, international newspapers and foreign language news sources in Dutch, French, German, Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese - from the 1980s onwards. Updated daily.
Box of Broadcasts (BoB) is an off-air recording and media archive service. It allows you to record TV and radio programmes scheduled to be broadcast over the next seven days as well as retrieving programmes from the last seven days from a selected list of recorded channels. In addition, you can watch programmes from the archive (back to around 2007 for 9 key channels), create clips, and compile your favourite shows into playlists.
Searchable full-text access to the British Library's collection of the newspapers, pamphlets, and books gathered by Reverend Charles Burney (1757-1817)--the largest and most comprehensive collection of early English news media. More than twelve hundred titles and almost one million pages are included.
Sourced from the extensive holdings of the British Library, British Library Newspapers delivers a wide range of irreplaceable local and regional voices to reflect the social, political, and cultural events of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. These newspapers, emerging during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a crucial channel of information in towns and major cities, provide researchers with a unique, first-hand perspective on history. With more than 160 newspaper titles, the series is comprised of approximately 5.5 million pages of historic content, from articles to advertisements. This collection illuminates diverse and distinct regional attitudes, cultures and vernaculars, providing an alternative viewpoint to the London-centric national press over a period of more than 200 years.
Searchable index to newspapers held by the British Library. Please note that you can only view the images of the newspapers for free if you are within British Library premises or in a public library; if you are searching from anywhere else you will need to buy either a credit package or an individual subscription.
Providing access to information about historic newspapers and select digitised newspaper pages, Chronicling America is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). NDNP, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC), is a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitisation of historic pages.
Allows you to search and view headlines, articles, advertisements, and opinion pieces from newspapers from a selection of European countries, dating from 1618 to the 1980s.
Includes access to the following databases: 17th-18th century Burney Collection newspapers; 19th Century UK Periodicals; Daily Mail Historical Archive, 1896-2004; The Economist Historical Archive, 1843-2012; The Financial Times Historical Archive, 1888-2010; The Sunday Times Digital Archive, 1822-2006; The Times Digital Archive; Independent Digital Archive,1986-2012; Telegraph Historical Archive 1855-2000; Crime, Punishment, and Popular Culture, 1790-1920; and Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
This BUFVC database lists over 180,000 news stories produced by ninety British cinema newsreels and cinemagazines, with details of production, content and release taken from the original issue sheets and other data sources. A programme of digitisation has added some 80,000 newsreel documents to the database in PDF format. There is extensive background information, including a biographical database of newsreel staff, a database of abstracts of relevant literature, newsreel histories and articles.
Archive of digitised newspapers from Singapore and Malaysia (1831 onwards). Includes the full text of the Straits Times from 1845 onwards, plus around 30 other titles. Many more newspapers from the region are also indexed in the database.
This historical newspaper archive provides genealogists, researchers and scholars with online, easily-searchable first-hand accounts and unparalleled coverage of the politics, society and events of the time.
The Rand Daily Mail, a Johannesburg daily, is a critically important title that pioneered popular journalism in South Africa. It is renowned today for being the first newspaper to openly oppose apartheid and contribute to its downfall. Search news articles from 1902-1985.
Open Access collection of newspapers from South Asia. With reportage dating as far back as the 1850s, the collection provides a wealth of coverage and perspectives on major regional and global events of the 19th and 20th centuries. Includes titles from Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan.
Open Access collection of late 19th and 20th century newspapers from Southeast Asia. Includes titles from Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.
Provides full text access to the historical archives of The Daily & Sunday Express, The Daily Mirror and The Daily & Sunday Star. Every page is available in thumbnail, small preview, full-size view and ready-to-print PDF.
Open access resource that allows you to search and access over 1,100,000 full-text pages from nearly 120 Welsh newspaper publications, generally up to 1910.
