Find and Access Newspapers by Title
Channel: University of Alabama Libraries
Date: 2019-07-25

A quick walkthrough of how to find and access a specific historical newspaper through The University of Alabama Libraries website. Want to see if we provide electronic access to 19th century issues of the Wall Street Journal? This tutorial will show you the easiest way to do so. 

Transcript: 
Hi, my name is Alex, and in this tutorial I'm going to show you how to find and access individual newspapers on The University of Alabama Libraries' website. 

In a previous tutorial, I showed you how to find historical newspaper databases. But what if you just want to see if The University of Alabama Libraries has access to a specific newspaper? Today we'll show you how to do that in a quick and easy way. 

So let's get started - for the purposes of this video let's say that I want to find out if I can acccess The San Francisco Chronicle. Instead of looking through our historical newspaper databases one by one, I’ll start by looking at Scout or The Libraries Catalog. 

Let’s try Scout first. I’ll put this in quotations…and change the drop-down from keyword to title – both of those should help us be as specific as possible.The first result, the electronic resource, is what we’re really looking for. And here you see all the online access we have for this paper. It’s available online from 1985 to the present in two different databases, and it’s available from 1869-1922 on Proquest Historical Newspapers. That does mean that we don’t have electronic access to this paper from 1923-1985.The other links are for microfilm versions of this paper, which would likely be your only option if we didn’t provide electronic access. 

And now let’s try the libraries catalog. Here we’ll change the drop-down from keyword to journal title. And our results will be pretty much the same. While you’ll usually be able to use Scout or the catalog to see if we have access to a newspaper, one major exception are the papers included in Newspapers.com. At this point, those newspapers are not findable via a Scout or catalog search. 

To get to newspapers.com, click on databases and use the search bar. You can either browse papers by location….or search for papers by location. We also have an entire separate tutorial on newspapers.com if you’d like to learn more. And that’s all for this tutorial. Hopefully you learned the basics of finding individual historical newspapers, and if you have any questions just ask a librarian.