Biography: Newspapers

Newspapers are sometimes the only source of biographical information on a person, often in the form of an obituary or brief article. Sifting through page after page can be time-consuming, but more and more newspapers are becoming digitized. In some cases, though, print newspapers and their indexes are still the best way to identify articles on a subject.

Newspaper indexes

Locating newspapers

Newspaper databases (links to separate LibGuide page)

Newspaper indexes that may be useful in your search are listed below with occasional annotations. Indexes are located in the Reference Collection on the second floor of the library.

Newspaper indexes only point you to articles. To locate a particular article, you must find out if the library subscribes to the newspaper containing the article in either print or electronic format. Find out what newspapers we subscribe to by using the Library Journal Links located on the library's home page.

Here you can see what search results in the Library Journal Links search look like. I have searched for "New York Times."

The second result provides the New-York daily times, the previous title for the NYT for the first few years of its publication. The third result gives the library's subscription information in various formats for the New York Times. The years beside each database link indicate the coverage in that particular database. You can navigate to the database of your choice and either browse to a certain issue or search within the publication. The final link to "Arkansas State University Print Holdings" provides the years that the library has the newspaper in either print or microform format. In the event that the library does not have a subscription to a newspaper online, you should always check to see if we have it in print format instead.

Please also see the section of this LibGuide on Library Databases. Several current and historical news databases are included that may be useful in finding biographical information.