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Newspaper Research

Newspaper Research

Newspapers are a treasure trove for researchers, whether you are digging into your family’s story, compiling a history of your house, or looking to learn more about a business or event. Society columns, marriage and birth announcements, obituaries, legal notices, classified ads, and news stories about people and events all help to deepen our understanding of the past. Keyword-searchable digitized newspapers make it possible to uncover information that would otherwise remain buried. You can search for a person’s name, an address, an event, or try experimenting with keywords, and you can limit your search results by place and date range. Here’s a guide to the newspaper resources available through the Lawrence Public Library:

NewspaperArchive offers full-text, keyword searchable access to over 15,000 newspapers from across the United States and around the world. We especially love NewspaperArchive because it includes the Lawrence Journal-World (and its predecessors) from 1879 to the present. You’ll need to use your LPL card number and PIN to access NewspaperArchive.

The Kansas Digital Newspaper Program is a collaboration between the Kansas Historical Society and Newspapers.com to digitize the historic Kansas newspapers that were in the public domain at the time of the project. This collection includes almost every paper from every city and town in Kansas between 1854-1923, and is freely available online. 

The Google News Archive includes the Lawrence Journal-World from 1911-2009 (Disregard that the first issue is dated 1828! That’s a typo.). The Google News Archive is essentially digital microfilm: it is not keyword-searchable, so searching involves either knowing a target date or scanning through the pages. It is freely available online.

Chronicling America, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, offers free online access to nearly 20 million pages of newspapers published in the United States between 1756 and 1963. Newspapers published by and for Black, Indigenous, and other ethnic communities and in a wide variety of languages are included in the collection. The Chronicling America project also includes the Directory of U.S.  Newspapers in American Libraries, which is an invaluable tool for locating newspapers that aren’t yet digitized. Chronicling America is freely available online through the Library of Congress. 

Lawrence Public Library cardholders have unlimited digital access to The New York Times. Through the TimesMachine, readers can access NYT issues from 1851-2002 in replica format; the New York Times Article Search allows readers to search for articles from 1851 to the present. 

LPL cardholders also have unlimited digital access to The Washington Post, which includes a searchable archive of the past eight years of articles, and The Wall Street Journal, which offers full-text articles going back to December 1997.

Newspaper Source Plus is a database that provides full articles from over 850 U.S. and international newspapers, including USA Today, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and The Times (U.K.), as well as transcripts of television and radio news. Newspapers Source Plus is freely available to Kansas residents courtesy of the State Library of Kansas. 

U.S. Newsstream offers access to recent premium U.S. news content, as well as archives which stretch back into the 1980s featuring newspapers, newswires, blogs, and news sites in active full-text format. U.S. Newsstream also includes access to the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and The Wall Street Journal. U.S. Newsstream is another database made available to Kansas residents by the State Library of Kansas. 

While digital newspapers offer amazing searchability and convenient, 24/7 access, there are some instances when you might need to use microfilm for newspaper research: 

  • An issue is missing from the digital platform but might be available on microfilm.
    •  LPL has microfilm for the Lawrence Journal-World from 1911-2013, as well as a few other Lawrence and Douglas County newspapers for various dates. 
  • You are wanting to look at a newspaper that is not available digitally but can be borrowed on microfilm from another library through interlibrary loan. 
    • Chronicling America’s Directory of U.S. Newspapers in American Libraries can be helpful in identifying whether a newspaper is available on microfilm and which library holds the microfilm. You may then need to check with the holding library to determine what the microfilm reel numbers are for the dates you are wanting to see.

Microfilm borrowed through interlibrary loan must be used in our building; our microfilm reader is in the Osma Local History Room on our lower level.

Still not sure where to look, or just not finding what you are looking for? We’re happy to help! Give us a call at 785-843-3833, chat us during business hours or email us anytime, or–if you need one-on-one research help–make an appointment with a librarian. 

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