Newspapers are primary sources of information about historical and current events. There are many different types of news sources available, and depending on your needs you might turn to print newspapers, online newspapers, digitized newspapers, aggregators, microform, or a combination of multiple formats, since many newspapers are available in more than one. This is a introduction to the different kinds of newspaper formats you will find in the James C. Kirkpatrick Library collections and how to locate these sources.
Online editions are published by many newspapers. This edition may have the same content and layout as its print equivalent but can also include additional content, such as articles available only online, as well as more up-to-date headlines and links to related news items. The online edition may have an archive of back issues, which may not be available elsewhere.
Through the generous support of the Provost's Office, JCKL receives access to PressReader. PressReader allows for browsing of the largest selection (over 7,000 titles) of online newspapers and magazines as though you were reading them in print. This unique database offers national and international newspapers including The Guardian, Chicago Tribune, The Globe and Mail, El Pais, and Le Figaro, to magazines such as Newsweek, Bloomberg Businessweek, and many others. The PressReader mobile app is also available for your personal tablet or phone.
Examples:
The Boston Globe, The Guardian, and Chicago Tribune are all titles available on PressReader Newspapers.
All United States newspapers from Press Reader
Additional newspaper offerings are available through NewsBank, including a rich array of Missouri and Kansas newspapers. Click to see the full listing of Missouri newspaper or the Kansas newspaper offerings through NewsBank. *Note - not all NewsBank offerings are available with full image view.
Examples:
Kansas City Star, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Sedalia Democrat, Warrensburg Star-Journal, and Columbia Daily Tribune,
The University of Central Missouri has an institutional subscription to The New York Times online newspaper provided by student government. To access the subscription, create an account at The New York Times website (https://nytimesineducation.com/access-nyt/) using your UCM email. The account provides access to News, Cooking, and the Wirecutter.
Once your educational account is set up access the New York Times online through the link below. Remember to always verify you are logged in using your ucmo.edu email address.
News databases and aggregators collect newspapers from many sources and make them available in one location, in a searchable format. They may include newswires, news journals, blogs, podcasts, transcripts from radio and tv, as well as websites. Most of the time you can directly access full-text articles, although some databases only contain links to articles, not the articles themselves. It is important to note that news articles from databases and aggregators may not include the photos or graphics which accompanied the originally published article. Also, articles available through the aggregator may or may not change throughout the day, as some newspapers print later editions. Sometimes the article is updated online, and the earlier content disappears, or the article will not be updated by a later version.
Examples:
ProQuest U.S. Newsstream, ProQuest International Newsstream, Nexis Uni (formerly LexisNexis Academic)
These links take you into the landing page for popular newspapers that we have in our databases. Newspapers articles can be searched or browsed from this page. The holdings are usually up-to-date, but some articles may not appear due to copyright issues. Many of these newspapers are also included as part of our aggregator packages.
Print newspapers have advantages and disadvantages as a research source. Once printed, the information on its pages is static, so it cannot be changed later on by third parties (such as by an editor, a hacker, or a government). However, to find what you are looking for, you must look at each page. Newsprint ages very poorly, and is difficult to preserve. Due to this problem, many libraries, including James C. Kirkpatrick Library, keep back issues of print newspapers in microform only.
JCKL has a selection of recently received print newspapers on the second floor including the Warrensburg Daily Star Journal, the Sedalia Democrat, and Dos Mundos.
Digitized newspapers are an exact facsimile of their print equivalent: the articles, the layout, the advertisements and the photographs are preserved together. Sometimes their content is full-text searchable, or sometimes only an image of the original newspaper page is viewable. Digitized newspapers vary in viewing quality, and if the original text was damaged or degraded, they can be difficult to read.
Examples:
Missouri Digital Newspaper Project, Warrensburg Papers in Newspapers.com, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Boston Globe, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times
Indexes are useful when you need to find information in a newspaper that has not been made full-text searchable, that has not been digitized at all, or is only available on microform. A newspaper index is an alphabetical list of news articles, sorted by subject, by name, or in other ways. Some newspaper indexes only list birth, marriage and death notices, and do not contain articles. An index can feature information from only one newspaper, or from a certain category of newspaper, such as all the newspapers from a particular city. Newspaper indexes do not contain articles themselves.
Microform formats provide a reproduction of the original in a reduced size. Microform formats like microfilm and microfiche are very useful for preserving newspapers, as they take up much less space and are much more stable over time than newsprint. Microform enables fragile or rare articles be consulted by researchers without exposing the original to handling. James C. Kirkpatrick Library has many newspapers in this format. JCKL's microform readers allow for easy reading and use and are located in the productivity center near the rotunda on the second floor.
Examples: