Newspapers  Tags: newspapers articles how-to  

The digital versions of historical newspapers are fully searchable by keyword, so you don’t need a separate index to use them. Consult the Historical Newspapers tab for a list of digitized papers. Similarly, UIUC subscribes to many full-text databases containing current news content- some going back as far as the 1980s.  Consult the Current Newspapers tab for a list of these sources. For newspapers that have not been digitized, there is very little article-level indexing, particularly before the 1970s.

Most newspaper indexes begin around 1970 or later, and few of these are online before 1990. For example, the print (or paper) index for the Washington Post begins in 1971 and is located in the Library’s remote storage facility. With coverage from 1977, the Index to Black Newspapers (016.0713 In2 and 016.0713 In21) is located in the History, Philosophy and Newspaper Library). Note that the print version of the Alternative Press Index (located in the Undergraduate Library) goes back to 1969, whereas the online version starts with 1991.

Older print indexes include the New York Tribune, covering the period from 1875 to 1906, the Cleveland Plain Dealer (1930s), the Christian Science Monitor (1950- ), and for Le Monde in the late 1960s and 1970s. Most of these print indexes are located in the Library’s remote storage facility and can be sent over to the main Library on request.