What do we do if we can’t find a desired newspaper to research if it is not online? Well over half of the titles to ever exist in America have not been digitized and all of the issues and dates for those digitized titles are not available online either.
So what do we do? The Library of Congress helps us out with the Directory of U.S. Newspapers in American Libraries so we can do offline research:
Directory of U.S. Newspapers in American Libraries https://www.loc.gov/collections/directory-of-us-newspapers-in-american-libraries/
This handy directory provides not just multiple ways to find newspapers published, but tons of facts about those newspapers. First of all, perform a search that leads you to a newspaper or group of newspapers that you are interested in.
Search Page
Here is an image of the Search page:
Here are all the fields that you can enter before performing your search:
- Keywords
- State/Province (Geographic Coverage)
- County (this is auto-populated after you select State or Province)
- City (this is auto-populated after you select State or Province and/or County)
- Frequency
- Language
- Ethnicity
- Material Type (e.g. Microfilm, Original)
- Standard Number (LCCN, ISSN, OCLC)
- Start Date
- End Date
You are not required to enter information in all of the fields.
Upon hitting the Search Button, the results that meet your criteria will be listed.
A list of Collection Items is presented. If you click on one of the results, you will be presented with the Information Page for that title.
Alternatively, you can Filter the results by selecting items from the left side of the page. Here are the Filtering Options:
- Title
- Date
- Country
- State/Province (Geographic Coverage)
- County
- City
- Ethnicity
- Language
- Subject
- Frequency
- Material Type
- Libraries That Have It
- Collection
- Division
- Access Condition
Once you get to the title that you wish to find more information about, you click on it. You will be presented with that title’s Information Page
Information Page
The Information Page specifies the title of the publication, the date range, and the city at the top of the page. There are two tabs available. Here is a description of the information presented in each of the two tabs.
About this Newspaper has the following information:
- Title
- Other Title
- Dates of Publication
- Created / Published
- Headings
- Genre
- Notes
- Medium
- Library of Congress Control Number
- OCLC Number
- Preceding Titles
- Succeeding Titles
- Additional Metadata Formats
Libraries that Have It has the following information:
- Holding Library or Institution
- Available as (e.g. Microfilm, Original)
- Dates
- Last Updated
And there you have it. This is how you find non-digitized newspapers in the U.S. and the libraries that have them.
To check out the new Chronicling America version 2.0 User Interface go HERE