Place

I am eagerly waiting for more newspapers to make their historical archives available online — so far we’ve got a few big-city papers like the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune and the Dallas Morning News, but there are so many more that need to get with the program — but the downside of those archives, and that includes all the smaller papers represented in Newspaperarchive.com, is that they cost money. So, as a less costly way of feeding my archive addiction, I’ve been looking through the free archives at the Cedar Rapids Public Library in Iowa. These PDF archives cover a number of smaller Iowa papers going back to the 19th century, and they include a lot of articles from the wire services, particularly the Associated Press. These articles are also available at Newspaper Archive, often in more complete form (though you can sometimes use Google News Archive Search to pick out bits that were left out of the other versions), but at least this is an inexpensive if frustrating way to search for old articles. At least until it stops being free.