Your Libraries have recently added an impressive array of newspaper archive databases. Covering a time span from the 18th – 20th centuries and a geographic range from the American south to Imperial Russia, Revolutionary Mexico, and beyond, these collections offer rich opportunities for primary source research. They join our already extensive collection of online newspaper databases offering thousands of publications from around the globe. We’ll be posting a series on these new resources over the next few weeks.
But today’s post is big news for our statewide and local papers, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The popular Arkansas Democrat-Gazette archive (Current and Historical) has recently added PDF page images for the Little Rock paper covering 2017 – present and for the Northwest Arkansas edition from 2021 – . Unlike PDF images for the historical editions of the Gazette and Democrat, these current PDFs are in full color. Issues are generally available by 10am the morning of publication (excepting weekends).
All the News that was Fit to be Printed
While the text version of the paper only includes articles written by Democrat-Gazette staff and omits wire stories or syndicated features, the page image shows all content, including color and black and white photos, advertisements, stories and opinion pieces from other papers, puzzles and games, shopping inserts, and even comics!
Search Results: Text and Page Images
Searching and search results for the PDF version of the paper is separate from the text version. When you search a text collection, your results will show the article title, date, pages, and other citation information. Results from an image collection will only show the date and page of the PDF.
Pagination and Citations
The older historical PDFs of the Gazette and Democrat have continuous pagination, which does not reflect the pagination actually used in the printed paper. When you use the citation generator tool for these historical editions, the page number given does not reflect the actual printed page number. (Tip: get the correct page number from the PDF).
In contrast, these recently-added page image collections show the correct section and page number for items.
Page Images for Other Papers
In addition to the Democrat-Gazette, America’s News will be adding PDF images to hundreds of other U.S. papers. Check the Format column on the source list for image availability.
