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Newspapers and other online news sources from the 17th – 21st centuries: ... using the British Library catalogue

A guide to historical and current newspapers and news sources, covering the 17th to 21st centuries. Includes searching tips, outline common problems and lists key resources available to Oxford scholars.

Searching in the British Library catalogue

It is worth consulting the BL's catalogue which has a dedicated newspapers search (via Advanced Search).

This is useful of course for checking the BL's excellent newspaper collections. However, even if you don’t want to go to the BL, the catalogue is useful for finding out which newspapers exist.

For example if you want to know what local papers covered an area you can search by place name. Once you know the name of the newspapers for the particular region you can then search for them in SOLO.

Snippet from the British Library catalogue, searching for newspapers relating to Edinburgh in Advanced Search.

British Library Newspapers: title list

The British Library has released of a metadata list of all British, Irish, British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies newspapers held by the British Library. This is now available on the British Library’s open access Research Repository as a public domain dataset.

The metadata includes information on the date range, the place of publication, variant (and successive) titles and editions, as well as whether or not a title has been digitised.

How to get this list? Just go to British and Irish Newspapers: A title-level list of British, Irish, British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies newspapers held by the British Library. and select how you want to download it (spreadsheet, zip file).