Library & Cultural Services: Linguistics: News & Media. Primary Sources

News & Media: Introduction

The library subscribes to a number of resources which you can use to access newspapers and television programmes. Newspapers can be very useful for identifying key trends, analysing language use and tracing original research. Some of the main sources which the library subscribes to are listed below, and you can see a complete list here.

Contemporary News Sources

Box of Broadcasts (BoB)
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.
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British Library News Data Guide
A great page to start exploring the BLs large and diverse newspaper collections from around the world

Historical News Sources: Collections

Gale Primary Sources
Gale Primary Sources provides access to a range of collections and newspaper archives. These databases include the Archives of Sexuality and Gender; British Library Newspapers; Crime, Punishment, and Popular Culture, 1790-1920; 17th and 18th Century Burney Newspapers Collection; and more.
Shibboleth users

news on screen
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.

Proquest Historical Newspapers
Historical newspaper archive which includes The Guardian, The Observer and The New York Times.
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Rand daily mail
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.
UK Federation
UKPress Online
UKPressOnline is your gateway to more than 3.5 million pages of the 19th-21st Centuries' newspapers, from 1835 to today, all as published on the day they were published and all searchable by name, word, phrase and date.
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Primary Sources

A huge range of primary source materials exist, either in open access format or purchased as digitised primary source collections by the Library. They are fundamentally important for historical research, and are also used by linguists for various purposes (including collecting data).

For an idea of what is available through the Library more information is available on the Sociology Subject Guide and on the History Subject Guide

See also details of our library's Special Collections & Archives, and more widely other UK archival collections, searchable through the Archives Hub portal