California Digital Newspaper Collection

The California Digital Newspaper Collection offers over 200,000 pages of California newspapers spanning the years 1849-191l: the Alta California, 1849-1891; the San Francisco Call, 1893-1910; the Amador Ledger, 1900-1911; the Imperial Valley Press, 1901-1911; the Sacramento Record-Union, 1859-1890; and the Los Angeles Herald, 1905-1907. All the issues are available online and can be viewed on your computer.

Additional years are forthcoming, as are other early California newspapers: the Californian; the California Star; the California Star and Californian; the Sacramento Transcript; the Placer Times; and the Pacific Rural Press.

The newspaper collection has two search modes: basic and advanced. Also available is a calendar feature that allows you to select a specific issue date and browse it.

The basic search allows you to enter any word or phrase and the entire collection is searched for matches. Advanced searching allows you to refine your results in various ways. The "Search in" field allows you to select which newspaper titles you would like to search. The default is set to search "all newspapers," but you may click on a single title or multiple titles. To select a single title, simply click on the title you want to search. To select multiple titles, click on the first title you are interested in searching, then hold down the control key (ctrl) as you click on your other selections. You can also sort the results in any of several different methods:

1. Best Match First:  This Google-like utility arranges the results to present the most relevant results first, providing you with the best possible matches.
2. Publication Title: Arranges the results alphabetically by newspaper title.
3. Date: Arranges the results chronologically by date.
4. Page: Arranges the results in page number order. With "ascending" selected in the second drop down menu, the results will be organized with all front pages displayed first, followed by all the second pages, then third pages, etc. This reduces browsing for users who are searching for a specific page. (For example, a user might know that the obituaries regularly occur on page 3 of a daily paper.)
5. Article Title: Arranges the results alphabetically by the first word that appears in the title.

The California Digital Newspaper Collection is supported in part by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian.

The California Digital Newspaper Collection is available at http://cdnc.ucr.edu.

Comments

[Dae Powell]

Unfortunately, I could browse newspapers all day and into the night. My grandmother got me interested in "reading the paper" at a very early age and it saddens me that several newspapers have folded. (pun intended) That more and more newspapers are digitized and on the Internet encourages me not only as a family researcher but as an amateur historian.

Happy Dae·
http://ShoeStringGenealogy.com (see Newspaper Research in the Presentations)

[Joan S.]

The University of Pennsylvania library has a website listing historical newspaper projects by state. The website is:
http://gethelp.library.upenn.edu/guides/hist/onlinenewspapers.html

[Zinnchick]

As of this morning, the website was down because they were installing bigger servers. The announcement says the website would be down all last week, but I'm guessing they're just running a little behind. You might want to wait a few hours, or days, and try again.

[Audrey]

I have tried several times to get the newspaper collection for the Amador Ledger and have been told that it is undergoing changes until June 12th. Today is the evening of the 15th. If it is not available, PLEASE update the date when it will be completed. Thank you!

[Gord Hines]

I just tried now (Tues 16 June 3:20 pm MDT/5:20 EDT) and several searches worked fine. The initial image view "click" got the under construction warning -- but I clicked again and the full page image came up for viewing just fine. So I'd say, try anyway... but expect that you might get intermittent delays.