Announcing the Catalog
Today, we’re excited to release Newspaper Finder’s Catalog feature! Think of the catalog as a complement to the map: while the map excels at providing geographic context, the catalog is designed for targeted searching. Users can now search for newspapers by title and town, with results displayed in a sortable table.
Searching by Title
Many of us researchers begin our search already knowing what newspaper we want to find. If searching in a large city, the Newspaper Finder map is not friendly. For example, searching New York City between the years 1880 and 1900 returns more than 600 newspapers. Put simply, this is not helpful.
The catalog makes this search easier. Type a specific newspaper’s name in the Newspaper Title search box and the results will appear in a table. For example, let’s perform a targeted search for all digital copies of the New York Times. Looking at the results, we can see that many providers have coverage. However, only one database, the Internet Archive, has issues that extend into the 2000s. Most importantly, the Internet Archive is a free service!
In addition, the catalog can be useful for searching newspapers whose listed publication location doesn’t tell the whole story. For example, the U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes was often published alongside American troops on the battlefield rather than remaining tied to a single city.
The title search also supports partial matching. For example, searching for terms such as Gazette, Herald, or Times will return all newspaper titles containing those words.
Searching by Town
Sometimes we want to skip straight to the point: “what newspapers exist for this town?”. The catalog offers a new Towns dropdown that does exactly this. Think of this as a complement to the map — It’s the same functionality, but a different user experience. To search by town, make sure only one country is selected and only one state is selected.
New Providers
We have also added two newspaper providers: Irish Newspaper Archives and Papers Past, the National Library of New Zealand’s newspaper archive.
- The Irish Newspaper Archives primarily covers the Republic of Ireland, with some coverage in Northern Ireland. In total, there are 160 new newspapers and 10 new locations not covered by any other database.
- Papers Past’s coverage spans the entirety of New Zealand in addition to Samoa and the Cook Islands. Around 25% of its newspapers are not covered by other databases.
Leave a Reply