
The East View Global Press Archive (GPA) is conducting a massive program essentially to digitize thousands of historical newspaper titles.
From the GPA website:
“The East View Global Press Archive® (GPA) is a groundbreaking program to create the most comprehensive collection of digital news sources from around the world. GPA is the result of a landmark initiative of Stanford Libraries and the Hoover Institution Library & Archives to digitally preserve and make more accessible thousands of original print newspaper publications collected by the Hoover Institution and now housed by Stanford Libraries.
Encompassing newspapers in more than 30 languages, GPA will ultimately include thousands of titles from across the globe, all presented in full-image and full-text format optimized for scholarly use. Many titles appearing in GPA will be first-ever digital versions of these publications and collectively this activity presents immense new value for scholarly research.”
Essentially the “pilot initiative”, The Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection through Stanford University’s Hoover Institution Library & Archives, and the Japanese Diaspora Initiative (JDI) is “currently the world’s largest online archive of open-access, full‑image Japanese American and other overseas Japanese newspapers. There are over 85 free titles of Japanese American newspapers available for online searching. There is an article about this project and database at Historical Japanese American Newspapers Online
The first set of GPA collections has 29 different digitized newspaper databases. Many are closed access, but four do have Open Access, available for anyone to search and discover. Read the entire list at Global Press Archive Titles
The 4 Open Access Titles can be found at GPA Newspaper Archives Open Access
The 4 Open Access Collections with the number of titles and years available are:
- Imperial Russian Newspapers (22 titles) (1702-1918)
- Independent and Revolutionary Mexican Newspapers (987 titles) (1807-1899)
- Late Qing and Republican-Era Chinese Newspapers (292 titles) (1911-1949)
- Middle Eastern and North African Newspapers (79 titles) (1902-1967)
I highly encourage you to avail yourself of these outstanding resources