Introduction

For North American research libraries, collecting and maintaining print or digital access to both European newspapers printed in English and foreign-language newspapers published outside North America is a significant challenge, one that will only increase in the coming years. The list of newspapers that are of value to researchers is long, yet fewer and fewer institutions can afford the cost and administrative burden of maintaining individual subscriptions to hundreds of titles from around the world. Both print and digital formats are expensive and difficult to maintain. And the most widely-used preservation format, microform, is disappearing rapidly as vendors cease to offer it.

This chapter reviews the current European newspaper resources available to librarians and researchers at North American (NA) universities and research institutions. We begin with a discussion of the background, contemporary considerations, and challenges facing librarians who are working with European newspapers. The next section describes resources and collections covering a broad spectrum of geographic regions, languages, and subjects; some of these materials may be limited in access to NA users (owing to copyright, legal issues, etc.). We then move to an overview of national libraries and resources in Europe that are carrying out their own digitization projects and providing access to their own collections. The following section covers consortial projects and historical initiatives, organized and funded primarily by NA institutions, at the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), the Library of Congress (LC), and other entities. The last section discusses the value of publishers and vendors such as East View, and we conclude with a discussion about shaping the future of European newspaper access.

Background, Contemporary Considerations & Challenges

Newspapers embody a number of counterproductive qualities, and might be the librarian’s most challenging resource. On the one hand, they figure among the most potent primary sources for researchers. As a daily chronicle of important events, a newspaper can, more than almost any other kind of document or artifact, paint a detailed portrait of a certain period and milieu. That portrait might be a global one, thanks to major papers that report on national and international events. Still more valuable to some researchers are the local dailies that bring to life smaller and otherwise less visible places and populations. On the other hand, the very attributes that make newspapers so important also make them incredibly difficult to collect, preserve, make accessible, and, at times, to use.

We can trace all the obstacles unique to collecting and consulting newspapers back to the format’s material makeup. Especially since the late 19^th century, the paper on which most newspapers have been printed has been of almost intentionally ephemeral quality (Müller 2014, 190–191). It makes good practical sense: the second industrial revolution, with its expansions in realms like transportation, communication, and global-scale political interactions, brought even far reaches of the world into focus for individual readers. The same period also saw enormous leaps in literacy. These factors resulted in a massive demand for information, and for reportage on current events around the world. To meet the desire for up-to-the-minute reportage, papers had to be printed quickly and frequently; to facilitate wide circulation, they also had to be printed in large quantities, while at the same time in as portable a format as possible to allow for easier transport and distribution. This meant printing on thin, light, pliable paper. Innovations in paper production met the need, as long-lasting cotton-based paper (rag paper) was replaced by wood-pulp paper, which was faster, easier, and cheaper to produce, but much less durable. As Lothar Müller succinctly states it, the “modern [news]paper embraced rapid, wide-scale, synchronous circulation and ceased trying to be a medium of long-term diachronic storage” (Müller 2014, 190). The move to digital publication and online-only newspapers has merely shifted this crisis to another format. Digital repositories and archives of newspapers struggle with an overload of material and with providing access, and long-term sustainability remains an elusive goal.

The newspaper’s key components also allowed for a growing variety of such publications. As it became easier and more affordable to produce a newspaper, the capacity to do so became increasingly democratized. Thus, the ability of smaller towns or distinct community groups (think of regional newspapers intended to serve the unique concerns of the Jewish or Muslim community, or papers for diaspora populations) to produce their own papers has increased. Here again the digital realm has led to an expansion of content and made collecting even more difficult.

No less important to the story is the fact that the practice of reading the newspaper came to reflect the medium’s qualities. That is, while books were still crafted as a reading matter that one kept and displayed on a shelf, never to discard, the very idea of the newspaper, along with its manufacture, invited an essentially transitory reading encounter. Think of those cinematic depictions of the newspaper printing press, where the unbroken sheet of news streams rapidly, endlessly off the single ream of paper. In contrast to the finite and self-contained reading experience of a book, the newspaper was imagined to flow—and thus to pass—at the pace of events it describes. Lacking the heft and sturdiness of a book, the newspaper’s flimsy physicality reinforced the impression. Put simply, there was little reason for the reader to retain the individual issues of a newspaper. (This is of course to say nothing of the immense volumes of space that a seemingly fleeting stream of newspaper would actually take up.) Digital files offer their own problems of storage costs and retrieval.

What does all of this mean for librarians trying to identify, amass, preserve, and connect users to historical newspapers and newspapers still being published? At the most fundamental level: because newspapers weren’t (and aren’t) designed to be retained, it means that few historical newspapers have been deliberately and systematically collected; even if they were, the sheer duration and volume of output make it very difficult to gather a comprehensive collection, a paper’s “full run.” Similarly, the great number of different newspaper titles that have been produced defy comprehensive collection, and small, local dailies have even lower chances of surviving. And because of their low-quality paper, newspapers deteriorate very quickly. Invaluable collections of newsprint have been lost to time alone. Most newspapers thus necessitate not just rapid preservation, but reformatting.

Even today, when we benefit from greater institutional interconnectivity and from technologies that enhance possibilities for resource preservation and dissemination, these basic obstacles translate into other practical challenges. Comprehensive reformatting is time-consuming and expensive and, what’s more, increasingly unfeasible as North American research libraries endure the continued crisis of budget slashing. Important collections of newspapers, both large and small, exist at countless institutions throughout the world; the records of those collections, however, remain highly decentralized, so it can be very difficult to determine which libraries hold which newspapers, as well as the precise contents of their holdings. Then, of course, one often must visit the holding library in person to actually use the newspaper.

This chapter’s broad geographic scope, covering all of Europe and the former Soviet Union, along with its examination of the challenges of the fragility of newsprint, the sheer number of newspapers, and the lack of a centralized record of their locations and contents, mean that this discussion must necessarily remain general. We list, for instance, only the major hubs for European newspapers within North America. Moreover, because they are so much more accessible, this chapter also emphasizes digital collections of historical newspapers and organized efforts to create and connect to such content. Since so many newspapers still exist only as analog media, however, it would be impossible to omit formats like microfilm (for decades the principal medium for reformatting newspapers) and local physical collections. Therefore, this chapter also provides some guidance on how to discover and utilize those resources.

In the end, when it comes to identifying and accessing historical newspapers, comprehensive print bibliographies will remain the librarian’s and the researcher’s most useful resource. Though sometimes outdated, print bibliographies still tend to present the fullest picture of what newspapers were printed at a given time and place; many also record what institutions have holdings of a given newspaper. We discuss these invaluable resources at greater length in the next section.

Resources and Collections Covering a Broad Spectrum of Geographic Regions, Languages, and Subjects

WorldCat (via FirstSearch): A subscription resource, WorldCat bills itself as the “world’s largest library catalog,” and is maintained by OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) using fees from libraries for services it provides. In addition to listing print bibliographies that are extremely useful for research into a newspaper or newspapers in a region, WorldCat also lists newspapers held at libraries and institutions around the world. As of this writing, WorldCat lists 405,861 newspaper titles worldwide. As a de facto “union catalog” for newspapers, WorldCat does not digitize newspapers and has no holdings or collections of its own, but rather serves as a guide to the collections at various libraries that choose to submit their holdings. An open access version of WorldCat is available via WorldCat.org.

Zeitschriften Datenbank (ZDB): Germany’s open-access union catalog of serials, commonly known by its acronym ZDB, captures the records of more than 3,600 institutional catalogs, enabling users to, as the site puts it, “find serial titles, newspapers, databases, yearbooks etc., in short, everything that was and is being published periodically in printed or electronic form and that is available in German and Austrian institutions.” At present, ZDB claims to contain records for over 68,000 newspapers. When available, ZDB connects users to digital content and keeps track of those papers which have planned digitization projects. It is not itself a digitization project, but rather a list of resources.

International Coalition on Newspapers (ICON): Organized by country, the ICON site at the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) links users to prominent digitization projects. It should be noted that not all listed content is publicly accessible. The site includes, for instance, commercial projects accessible via proprietary databases.

Wikipedia: This crowd-sourced online encyclopedia, maintained by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation in the US, can provide a useful entry point for specific regions, languages, communities, and more, since it has crowd-sourced lists and resources that are often not found elsewhere. If a researcher is trying to find the titles of all newspapers that existed in a particular region or community, rather than trying to find only those newspapers which survived in print or digital format, sources like Wikipedia might provide useful information unavailable elsewhere.

Lists Compiled by US Libraries

The European Studies Section (ESS) of ACRL has created the webpage Indexes and Guides to Western European Periodicals, which has 12 sections noting prominent directories to periodical literature for western Europe. Similar sites can be found for Eastern European countries. Both the LC’s Russian Newspapers in the Library of Congress and Indiana University’s Russian Serials guide, for instance, include listings for print periodical indexes and bibliographies, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign maintains Periodical Resources for the Countries of the Former Yugoslavia. These pages, and the many others like them, are useful not only for immediate reference but also for building up a key vocabulary in the target language to aid an expanded search.

Print Bibliographies

When addressing the question of which newspapers were published at a specific time and place, older, analog resources will often prove the most informative. In the pre-digital age, bibliography was almost an artform. Some prodigious practitioners, for instance, devoted their careers—their lifetimes—to producing exhaustive indexes of a country’s publishing output. Today, librarians recognize any such reference work as a gold mine.

Print bibliographies can vary in focus and scope. While there are multi-volume tomes that endeavor to cover great swaths of time and geography, often more useful are works which focus on a specific period, locale, or subject matter. Catálogo de prensa almeriense, 1823–1939, for instance, records only the newspapers of the city of Almeria in southwest Spain; Pressa Gulaga: 1918–1955 lists the periodical presses that emerged from Soviet forced labor camps (gulags); and A Bibliography of Chinese Newspapers and Periodicals in European Libraries (2011) surveys European collections in the 1970s. As the publisher’s description states:

This bibliography has no real predecessor, and it reveals for the first time the extraordinary riches of European Libraries. Few individual libraries in Europe can rival the great collections of America and Japan. The bibliography shows, however, that European libraries do have very large holdings of materials, including many items that are unique. Readers should find the details of holdings of libraries in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe particularly impressive. The United Kingdom and France are both shown to have predictably large and widely varying collections. Few people, however, are aware that in Rome there are twenty libraries with sinological material. (University of London. 2011, viii).

This is the power of such specialized reference works—sometimes the lifetime accomplishment of a scholar or team of researchers—and you will be hard-pressed to find a digital equivalent for this type of detailed comprehensive survey. Be aware that such print works can be variously categorized as catalogs, bibliographies, directories, or indices, so a search for them in WorldCat (via FirstSearch), for instance, should try all the different terms.

Depending on the region, the availability of centralized indexing resources can vary greatly. Russia, for instance, has demonstrated tremendous foresight in putting such resources online. One remarkable example is feb-web.ru, the Fundamental’naia elektronnaia biblioteka (Fundamental Electronic Library). The Periodika section of the site features full digitizations of the seminal indexes for pre-Soviet periodicals, including Lisovkskii’s indispensable Bibliografiia russkoi periodicheskoi pechati, 1703–1900 gg (1915), which is also available in HathiTrust and elsewhere.

When searching for bibliographies in WorldCat (via FirstSearch), knowledge of the target language will, as ever, be crucial. For instance, if you are looking for newspapers published in the Soviet Union, it can be very useful to know that in Russian such a directory can be described by a number of terms such as библиография (bibliographiia), справочник (spravochnik), указатель (ukazatel’), and летопись (letopis’). Including those terms in a WorldCat search can help lead you more quickly to an item like Gazety SSSR 1917–1960: bibliograficheskii spravochnik (Newspapers of the USSR 1917–1960: A Bibliographic Directory), published 1970–1984. This valuable five-volume catalog is organized geographically and includes information such as where, how often, and over what period of time a given newspaper was published. After identifying relevant titles, search WorldCat for existing institutional holdings and use Google or other search engines to see whether the newspapers have been digitized.

Subscription Resources

PressReader, Factiva, Nexis Uni, and Global Newsstream: Proprietary databases such as these aggregate large numbers of newspaper and magazine titles. All four feature content from important European periodicals, many of which are otherwise only accessible via individual subscription. Functionality and features vary. PressReader, for instance, works like a digital newsstand, allowing users to browse more than 6,000 newspaper and magazine titles and select individual issues, which they can then interact with much like a print copy. Factiva, NexisUni, and Global Newsstream, by contrast, function like more conventional databases, enabling users to conduct topical searches across large numbers of full-text newspaper titles as well as other media sources. With each of these sources, archives are another point of consideration. Some newspaper titles on Factiva, NexisUni, and Global Newsstream are archived many years back, while archives for other titles are shallower. PressReader retains content for only 90 days. All told, these databases will be of limited utility to researchers looking for “historical” newspapers more than a couple decades old.

Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory: This proprietary service provides bibliographic and publication information on more than 300,000 periodicals of all types, including international newspapers. Although intended primarily for librarians responsible for purchasing serials, Ulrichsweb can prove very useful to researchers as well. In addition to crucial pieces of information such as when a given periodical began publication, its frequency (period) of publication, and whether it is still active, Ulrichsweb indicates which services index the periodical and feature content abstracts, as well as those which host full-text content. For some periodicals, the database has this information dating back hundreds of years, and its search functionalities allow users to cast a wide net to capture multiple titles within a given language, geographical area, and time period. In short, Ulrichsweb serves that important purpose of helping discover what was circulating at a given time and place and, when possible, indicating where one might access identified titles.

Search Engines

Widely-available search tools such as Google can prove incredibly powerful in the face of this quandary of what now exists (that is, the newspapers that are currently available in library holdings and archives) and what should exist (that is, the total number of newspapers that circulated at a given time and place). A simple Google search for “German newspapers World War 2,” for instance, will retrieve resources like EuroDocs (mentioned below), but it will also pull up other sites—library research guides, encyclopedia entries, the sites of other educational or cultural heritage institutions—with compiled lists. Crucially, Google can quickly connect users to content created in the region or language, not only to English-language resources.

Google’s great virtue—its immense scope—can, however, also create a significant challenge, namely a hyperabundance of information. When appropriate, target the search by utilizing alternative search engines. While Google also claims a near monopoly on the browser market in Europe, other search engines’ retrieval algorithms may hierarchize results in different ways, revealing fresh content (StatCounter 2022). Certain countries may have preferred domestic search engines, too, which can have important advantages. In Russia, for instance, the majority of searches occur through Yandex.ru (Яндекс). What’s more, Yandex is designed to account for the dynamism of Russian grammatical forms. Russian, like related Slavic languages, is case-based, so a word’s spelling often changes according to its grammatical function in a given clause. Based in the US and developed for the English language, Google is less well-equipped to capture such iterations in form that are the hallmark of other languages, so Yandex can simultaneously conduct more broad and more precise searches.

European National Libraries and European-Based Digitization Projects

A national library’s very purpose is to comprehensively collect the country’s historical and ongoing publication output, so national library catalogs in Europe should be among the first resources consulted, especially if searching for a broad picture of which newspapers were circulating at a given time. The same sites may be excellent places to view digital copies of historical newspapers, thanks to the tremendous investment of time and effort on the part of national libraries and research institutions, as well as European-wide funders, to preserve these fragile materials for future researchers. Resources funded and carried out by national libraries may or may not be intended for English-language users from outside the country. Many online collections are best used in the language of their country of origin, as they will have additional features, updates, news, etc.

Individual initiatives are numerous, and their quantity will vary country to country. It may surprise some that Russia, for instance, is in many ways at the vanguard of creating open access digital collections. Many Russian regional libraries and research institutions are digitizing and making available excellent collections of historical newspapers. Researchers studying Poland, too, benefit from that country’s strong open access initiatives. For example, see the Digitized Polish Historic Newspapers and Serials list compiled by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.

While many sites, especially those from larger institutions in Western Europe, offer English interfaces, some do not. The ANNO (short for AustriaN Newspaper Online) platform describes itself as the “virtual reading room” of the Austrian National Library and currently offers over 1,500 titles and 27 million pages of newspapers and magazines, primarily from German-speaking regions such as Austria, Germany, Hungary, and Switzerland; the search interface is configured for German-language users. Similarly, while many Russian state libraries have English interfaces, others do not. For instance, the country’s State Public Historical Library (Gosudarstvennaia publishnaia istoricheskaia biblioteka), whose e-library hosts an impressive collection of historical newspapers, is only navigable in Russian. The user will thus benefit not only from Russian reading comprehension but also facility with a Cyrillic keyboard.

Language is not the only barrier you might encounter when consulting these kinds of collections. Long-term sustainability is a concern, especially since project websites are not always maintained after the project ends. In other words, don’t be surprised by dead links. And some national libraries, such as those of Greece and Slovenia, have digitized many of their newspaper collections but restrict everything within copyright to in-person access at their physical reading rooms. The National Library of Prague currently makes its digitized newspaper collections available only to citizens of the Czech Republic, or to users accessing them from within the nation’s (perhaps also EU) domains.

Europeana: This European Union-funded resource aims to provide online access to cultural heritage across Europe. Its collection of digital newspapers is taken from microfilm, rather than digitized from the original print materials, and as of December 2021 their holdings contained nearly 1 million full-text newspaper issues from 20 European countries.

Consortial Projects and Historical Initiatives Based in North America

The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) has been the major consortial source for foreign newspapers for North American research libraries since 1949. Since its inception, it has developed a number of region-specific projects.

Foreign Newspaper Microfilm Project (FNMP): This CRL initiative officially began in 1956 but had roots in other cooperative filming programs. Together with the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Harvard, the Library of Congress, and the University of Chicago, FNMP microfilmed as many as 146 foreign newspaper titles and funded its work, in part, by charging subscription fees and selling copies of resulting microfilm to institutions that wished to have a copy of the material at their own library.

Slavic and East European Materials Project (SEEMP): This is one of the distinct, regionally specific microfilming initiatives at CRL. Founded in 1995, SEEMP followed the model of the five other projects which existed at that time. Member libraries contribute annually to the SEEMP fund, and SEEMP members choose specific projects (newspapers, journals, or other formats) for preservation. SEEMP prioritizes scarce and underrepresented titles that are available for reformatting, and focuses on the region that includes Eastern and Central Europe, Russia, the Transcaucasian countries, and the Central Asian countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union.

To illustrate the kind of contributions that initiatives like SEEMP can make to the historical newspaper landscape, take the example of a recent multi-year project to microfilm newspapers from the South Slavic region. The project preserves materials supplied by the University of Michigan, which systematically collected newspapers from the former Yugoslavia, especially during that region’s war years (1991–2001). In rough numbers, the project will microfilm complete or substantial runs of 55 newspaper titles, totaling over 250,000 pages of newsprint. CRL member libraries will have interlibrary loan access to the film.

While FNMP and CRL’s other Global Resources Programs, like SEEMP, remain among the most significant efforts to systematically preserve historical newspapers, they have important limitations. For one, neither FNMP nor SEEMP were intended to be comprehensive holdings of all newspapers published in a particular region. Instead, such initiatives can centralize and expand access to substantial collections of especially important and otherwise hard to find historical newspapers. The “Newspapers” filter of CRL’s online catalog can therefore be a useful place to initiate a search. It is also worth noting that member libraries of CRL can request microfilm via interlibrary loan. This service is also available to non-member libraries for a fee.

Next, there are disadvantages to the media that FNMP and SEEMP produce. Both initiatives began in response to requests from member libraries at a time when microform was the optimal format available for preserving newsprint. With the advent of digital methods, however, microfilm has in some ways fallen out of favor. While it remains a viable format for preserving newspapers because it is durable and has a long shelf life, microfilm lacks the ease of access and dynamic search functionalities which make digital objects so user-friendly. It is worth noting, too, that younger generations of researchers, so accustomed to having content available on their personal computers, are often unfamiliar with how to use microfilm, if they are aware of it as a resource at all.

Global Press Archive (GPA): This large digitization effort was realized as a joint enterprise between CRL and commercial vendor and publisher East View. At the time of writing this chapter, CRL looks to be turning more rapidly away from film and toward digitization. GPA typifies this trend, and it demonstrates a project model that bridges the nonprofit and for-profit sectors. In this partnership, East View provides the scanning technology and the content hosting platform, while CRL, drawing also on the holdings of Stanford Libraries and the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, supplies the materials. Phase 1 of the project, completed in 2021, has already digitized more than 500,000 issues of over 1,500 publications, totaling some 5 million pages. The content is organized into different collections, some of which are available open access (OA) and others only via subscription fees. Imperial Russian Newspapers is one such OA collection. It alone offers over 300,000 pages of content from 25 pre-1917 newspapers.

CRL appears, moreover, to be in the midst of an organizational overhaul, and there are signs suggesting that they will likewise be shifting initiatives like SEEMP away from microfilm to focus on digitization. One example of this shift is the German-North American Resources Partnership (GNARP), another Global Resources program, which is in the process of digitizing a set of public domain German-language newspapers. This transition to digitization is not a simple one; it will not only require funding, but also the acquisition of new technologies along with the hardware and know-how to utilize them and serve member institutions’ needs.

Library of Congress (LC): Another major player in the 20th-century newspaper discussion was (and remains) the Library of Congress, the unofficial national library of the United States. With a network of offices around the world, LC operates a Cooperative Acquisitions Program (CAP) in which academic research libraries pay LC to acquire print materials, in a variety of formats, which the libraries could not otherwise obtain through their regular vendors, and these materials are then distributed to the paying libraries. LC would microfilm newspapers and make them available to academic libraries through interlibrary loan or purchase. Once countries started to emerge from the Eastern bloc and joined international copyright agreements, however, LC could no longer sell the microfilm of many of these newspapers and periodicals.

Naturally, the LC’s collections of historical newspapers are strongest in American publications, but it also offers hundreds of titles and many thousands of items from European and former Soviet states. LC is increasingly digitizing and making its content available online as well.

EuroDocs: This is perhaps one of the most useful resources for North American researchers seeking online open-access historical newspapers, especially from Western European countries.

The volume and variety of content to which EuroDocs connects users is impressive, and the feat is all the more admirable because EuroDocs, unlike the initiatives above, is a very local operation. The site was started by Richard Hacken, formerly the European Studies and Linguistics Librarian at Brigham Young University (BYU), who gathered, described, and provided direct links to useful content he encountered. EuroDocs continues to grow and be updated by BYU library staff. The site does have some notable drawbacks concerning newspapers. Its main focus, for instance, is primary source documents more generally, not newspapers. Additionally, while the site and its pages are clearly organized by region and chronology, the site is quite austere, featuring only minimal search functionality. Users must thus do a lot of browsing and make liberal use of the Search or Control + F function. There are a few exceptions to this general rule: for example, EuroDocs features specific pages dedicated to historical newspapers and journals for countries such as Germany, France, Italy, and Switzerland. For those researching Slavic, East European, and Eurasian countries, EuroDocs has some valuable, if less expansive, content.

Guide to Open Access Historical News Sources from Slavic, East European and Eurasian Countries: The East Coast Consortium of Slavic Library Collections (which consists of a dozen major libraries, including LC, NY Public, and many of the Ivies) maintains this guide with dedicated pages listing OA digital archives of historical newspapers for each of 29 countries making up the large and diverse region.

The World Newspaper Archive (currently in development) is a promising resource for bridging the gap between the nonprofit and for-profit space, since it is a partnership between CRL and commercial vendor/publisher Readex/Newsbank.

The Value of Publishers and Vendors

Researchers sometimes ask why libraries need to work with commercial publishers and vendors; there are many answers to this question. Commercial vendors have more agility than research libraries and can benefit by being smaller and more flexible and by working in a more specific market. They also represent publishers, who by-and-large produce the content. Newspaper publishers are struggling now with COVID (as of this writing), on top of decades of challenges such as converting from print to digital. Commercial vendors can handle challenges like international rights negotiations, royalties, distribution, and other issues that neither the publisher nor the end purchaser (the library) are set up to handle. Similarly, creating digital files is just one part of the problem, while hosting them is another issue entirely—a very expensive and technically demanding one. Many prominent commercial vendors have platforms on which to host their proprietary content, and so have an existing infrastructure in place that can be expanded and modified.

One service model on which commercial vendors work looks like this: A research library (or a group of libraries) approaches the vendor with a unique collection of materials they would like to see digitized. The vendor covers the costs of shipping and digitizing the materials, and of creating the digital archive. Once the digital archive is active, the library that supplied the materials receives free access to the digital archive, while the vendor makes up for expenses and funds site maintenance by collecting subscription fees from other institutions.

East View: The most significant source of digitized historical newspapers in the world of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian librarianship, East View is responsible for a few invaluable collections—including, for example, digitized complete runs of two of the Soviet Union’s most important newspapers, Pravda (Truth) and Izvestiia (News). For each paper, this amounts to nearly 100 years of coverage captured across tens of thousands of issues. The same collections, it must be noted, also demonstrate the main caveat of commercial digitization ventures, namely cost. These collections’ significance comes with a substantial price tag, which can make subscription prohibitive for some institutions.

Major vendors in the field of European newspapers include East View, Gale, and ProQuest. Since digital newspaper collections and digitization partnerships are increasingly in demand by researchers and scholars, we can expect to see more collaborations between publishers, vendors, and libraries to develop these resources and to make more newspapers available to those who can afford to pay the subscription fees.

Conclusion: the Future of European Newspapers

A central theme of this chapter has been the scattered nature of European historical newspaper holdings—scattered not just geographically, among countless institutions, but also across formats, from original print to microfilm to digital surrogates—and the lack of any tool which can systematically identify them, or any catalog in which they are systematically recorded. There is growing interest in crowd-sourced resources that might address these issues, allowing researchers and users to add their own data to combined databases or central research guides. However, there are many unresolved questions such as how and by whom such listings would be funded, maintained, and preserved.

One vital consideration to all projects and initiatives is this basic question: how will these newspapers be used? Feedback is needed from the primary users of these newspaper archives and collections to determine what to prioritize. Text mining is currently under much discussion among publishers and vendors, since it allows researchers to use huge amounts of data, but access to these collections is often expensive. And other essential features of newspapers may be neglected in the rush to digitize. For many researchers, for instance, the visual aspect is key, highlighting the importance of the physical aspect of these newspapers. Digital image analysis can be used in searching for photographs or images in an online setting, but the value of the visual moves beyond this. Sometimes, when a digital copy exists, researchers are no longer allowed to see the physical item, and digitized materials or microfilm do not provide the same experience of working with the item and seeing its size, the quality of the paper, where a fold is placed, and which aspects are centralized and which hidden. Advertisements and inserts are often excluded from digitization and article databases, but they contain valuable information as well, depicting aspects of life and culture—habits, values, fads—that don’t necessarily have a place in the news itself but that are of course incorporated into it. Advertisements are also crucial to bankrolling a newspaper’s production, allowing it to be printed with the frequency and distribution which is the medium’s essence.

This chapter only scratches the surface of this topic, especially since the situation regarding newspaper access and preservation is rapidly changing. Readers are advised to consult chapters in Section 1 of this Handbook for information on newspaper collections and resources specific to a region of Europe and Eurasia.

As always, the most valuable resource will be your colleagues and counterparts at other academic libraries and research institutions, so please be active in joining mailing lists and professional organizations, and in sharing your questions and expertise with others in your field. Useful professional organizations for European studies include but are not limited to:

• Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), in particular its Committee on Libraries and Information Resources (CLIR)
• European Studies Section (ESS), a section of the Association of Research & College Libraries
• Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL)
• Seminar for the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM)

It should also be noted that some of CRL’s Global Resources Programs, such as the German-North American Resources Partnership (GNARP) and the Collaborative Initiative for French Language Collections (CIFNAL), offer personal memberships for librarians at libraries which are not institutional members. In addition, there are other professional organizations that might be relevant, such as ALA’s CORE division’s Newspaper Interest Group, the American Historical Association (AHA), the Modern Language Association (MLA), the Music Library Association (also MLA), and so on. Ask your colleagues which professional organizations and groups they find most useful! Collaboration across institutions, national borders, subject areas, and languages is key to supporting research, as is learning from and listening to your users about how and why they are interested in using newspapers.

References and Recommended Readings

Catálogo de Prensa Almeriense 1823-1939. 1982. Almeria: Diputación Provincial de Almería.

Episkoposov, G. L. (Grant Levonovich). 1970-1984. Gazety SSSR: 1917-1960. bibliograficheskii spravochnik. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo “Kniga.”

Gorcheva, A. I͡U. 1996. Pressa Gulaga : 1918-1955. Moskva: Izd-vo Moskovskogo universiteta.

Lisovskīĭ, N. M. (Nikolaĭ Mikhaĭlovichʺ). 1915. Bibliografii͡a russkoĭ periodīcheskoĭ pechati 1703-1900 gg. : (materialy dli͡a istoriī russkoĭ zhurnalistiki). Petrograd: Tipografii͡a Akts. obshch. tip. di͡ela.

Müller, Lothar. 2014. White Magic: The Age of Paper. Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity Press.

StatCounter. 2022. “Search Engine Market Share Europe, Apr 2021 – May 2022.” Accessed June 2, 2022. https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/europe.

University of London. 2011. A Bibliography of Chinese Newspapers and Periodicals in European Libraries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.