Newspaper collections
What we collect
- Australian newspapers - capital city dailies, major regional city newspapers, a range of other country town newspapers, newspapers published by ethnic groups and political organisations, and newspapers representing special interests. Our Library cooperates with the state and territory libraries through the Australian Newspaper Plan to collect, preserve and provide access to Australian newspapers, with each library taking responsibility for newspapers published in their jurisdiction.
- Digitised Australian newspapers including the first newspaper published in Australia, the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, are freely available through Trove
- Overseas newspapers - we have the largest collection of overseas newspapers in Australia. Our newspaper collections from Asia and the Pacific region are particularly strong.
- Online versions of overseas and Australian newspapers through major full-text databases - such as the Times Digital Archive and many more - are available to registered users of the Library.
How the collection is arranged
- All of our newspapers and newspaper indexes may be found in our catalogue.
- Our Australian newspapers research guide and Overseas newspapers research guide provide further information on locating newspapers and indexes.
- The Print and microfilm newspapers can be accessed in our reading room.
- Some Australian and overseas newspapers are available online to registered users through databases that the Library subscribes to.
- Trove provides freely available access to our digitised historic Australian newspapers.
How to access newspapers
You can access a range of current and historical newspapers online for free, including:
Early historical newspapers
- View 16th to 19th century papers from the United Kingdom and American titles.
- Many titles can be accessed from home via eResources but first you will need to join the Library.
Early Australian newspapers
- Visit Trove to view Australian newspapers published between 1803 and 1954.
- Trove is freely available worldwide and can be used anywhere with internet access.
- New newspapers are being digitised and added all the time.
- Newspapers published between 1955 and 1990 are still in copyright and can only be viewed onsite using the original print copies or microform.
- Use the catalogue to find what you need and request to the item to view it the Main Reading Room.
- It helps to have a date and location of the news item in mind before you start your search.
Current newspapers
- Many newspapers from 1990 onwards are available through eResources with your Library login.
- Popular databases include NewsBank and PressReader. To access these resources, simply visit our eResources portal and search for each database under the 'Browse eResources' tab.
- There are also overseas newspapers in languages other than English.
The Library has created comprehensive research guides to help you find out about our newspaper collection.
Discovery video: Le Courrier Australien
My name is Heather and I am the Digital Education Coordinator here at the National Library.
Before we start this short video I’ll just turn off the camera.
Before we start today’s video I would like to pay my respects to the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people on whose land this video was recorded.
I acknowledge the deep and enduring connection of all indigenous Australians to country and I pay my deepest respect to elders past, present and emerging.
I would also like to extend my respects to the traditional owners of the lands from which you may be joining me today, including the Cammeraygal people on whose country I grew up on in Sydney’s northern suburbs.
Alright so let’s launch into our subject today.
This year for Bastille Day, the national holiday of France, we thought to share with you a great French language resource that is online and freely accessible.
In this short discovery video we will discover Le Courrier Australien, a French English bilingual publication that is one of Australia’s oldest surviving foreign language newspapers.
It is available online and at your fingertips through Trove.
In fact you can see it here on the screen in front of you, the very first edition of Le Courrier Australien printed on Saturday, the 30th of April 1892.
From this time until 2011 this newspaper was in print format.
These issues have now been digitised and they’re available to view through Trove.
Le Courrier Australien is not all written in French language as you might assume.
In fact it is an interesting combination of both French and English language articles.
When it first started back in the late 1800s it was one of the only sources of information about news and events in France and other Francophone countries such as Belgium.
As well as Francophile events that were happening here in Australia the newspaper covers a range of subjects such as science and trade, literature and fine arts, fashion, visits from French personalities to Australia, politics, the first and second world wars and other content relating to politics more broadly.
There are advertisements for products and companies and notices, much like other newspapers.
The list really does go on about what you can expect to find here.
Le Courrier is excellent if you are interested in learning more about history as it relates to the French community in Australia and French and Australian history and relations generally.
Today Le Courrier Australien is a website, it covers everything the newspaper covered in terms of the content and advertisements and you can still access the content in both French and English languages.
So let’s have a look at Le Courrier Australien in context.
I will show you how to do a basic search, how to download an article and where to find citation information in Trove.
Lastly, parlez-vous français?
Do you speak French or are you learning to read and write in French?
I will show you how you can make this amazing resource more discoverable by correcting articles that have been incorrectly transcribed by the OCR, that is the optical character recognition software.
As you can imagine the words often get jumbled and the special characters such as the grave accent, the acute accent or the cedilla, that squiggle under the C in Francais aren’t recognised.
If you are interested in French history and how it connects with Australian history you might find this a simple and fun way to get involved and learn along the way.
Okay, let’s redirect now to the Trove homepage and take a look at a basic search.
I’ll click on the Trove icon and that will redirect us to the homepage.
Okay, there are two simple ways to do a basic search.
The first one you can jump straight in and use the title of the newspaper as keywords and type them into the search bar.
Change the category to newspapers and gazettes and hit search and away we go.
You can see here there is a long list of results.
To reduce this list use the panel on the right, limiting the results as you like.
Let's click on title, for example, so that we know the content we’re looking at comes from Le Courrier and for something fun we can limit the category or type of content to humour.
In this case there is only one article showing so let’s click on this.
In fact it is an article that includes cartoons created by the Noumea-born cartoonist, Emile Mercier.
During his lifetime Mercier contributed cartoons to many different Australian newspapers.
His cartoons are witty and comment on the daily life of Australians as they were during his lifetime.
In this case the article and cartoons cross over two pages.
Using this handy tab up the top you can simply browse through these pages as you would if you had the paper in front of you and flip from page to page.
Here we can zoom in and have a look at the detail of some of his cartoons.
We can also zoom out and view the cartoons in context.
So now that we've had a look at this way of doing a basic search let’s go back to the Trove homepage and look at another option to browse issues of Le Courrier Australien.
Now that we are back on the homepage what we need to do is click on the explore tab at the top here and underneath the browse newspapers and gazettes we’re going to open the browser.
From here we’ll go to browse titles and under the column of titles A to Z we’ll go down to L. Carefully scroll down the list of titles in the L category until you happen upon Le Courrier Australien.
Now you’ll see a column with the life dates from 1892 all the way to 2011.
I’m particularly interested in the period of the 1940s so why don’t we have a look at the 1945 issue.
If we go to July, given that we’re thinking about Bastille Day, and we’re in luck, we can see that we have Friday the 13th, the day before Bastille Day.
We’ll click on that and what we have is a list of pages for that issue.
If I click on the eye symbol on the right-hand side that will bring up the first page in its entirety.
If I click on the reset zoom button it will centre the first page here.
If I hover over the different articles on this page and click you’ll see that I’m presented with an option to read this particular article or you can use the list on the left-hand side and select which article you would like to read.
As you can see here the article at the bottom, France’s National Day, is written in English whereas the other articles here are in French language.
If I click on the second article we can see the images highlighted.
The image shows a scene of the storming of the Bastille on the 14th of July 1789 and which was the event that marks the beginnings of the French revolution and the change from monarchy to republic.
Now suppose you were interested, like we are today, in Bastille Day, in the history of this French national day in Australia, you might choose to download one of these articles that you see on this front page.
If we click on this one here it’s a very small article but quite informative because it gives us some idea about who was attending different functions for France’s national day back in 1945 and in Sydney.
So let’s have a look at how you can download this article if it was of particular interest to you.
All you need to do is go over to the left-hand side, click on the download button here and as I said you can select the type of format that you’d like to download the article to, whether that’s as an image, a PDF or as text.
The resolution of the images and text downloaded is not high and the content found here is intended here for personal, private use and research purposes.
With that in mind let me show you here where the citation information lives.
This is very handy.
The details of this particular article and the newspaper issue generally can be found under details.
You will first find a persistent URL in case you want to refer to the article and find it later again or a persistent URL for the page and you will see that there are different citation styles available.
At the very bottom you will find an option to export the citation to reference software such as Endnote.
Lastly, en français, a little bit of text-correcting goes a long way so let’s redirect to a French language article on this page by simply returning to the view all articles on this page option, reset the zoom so we can see the whole page.
Let’s click on the third article we can see from the list which you can see here isn’t so clear however we can make out in that first line ‘L’invitation formelle du President’.
Let's have a look over here on the left-hand side.
In order to text-correct all you need to do is click on the small pencil.
That will then highlight the line of text from the article that you’re about to correct and we can see here that as I correct, L apostrophe, invitation formelle du – in this case – President.
If we click save you’ll see that it now has saved that text.
Now that I have text-corrected that small portion and I'm logged into my account here I can click on text corrections and you’ll see that the text correction I just made is now available for me to view in my list.
It notes here that it’s one line and I can be redirected to that article there.
But if you enjoy this comprehension exercise and want to do more you have the option to simply return where you left off if you are logged in or you can use the persistent URL as I showed you earlier in the detail section and that will take you back to the article and you can make anonymous contributions there.
Bonne fête nationale et à bientôt.
We look forward to you viewing more of our discovery videos and learning more about the National Library’s collection and the great resources we have available for you.
Thank you very much