Newspapers & Magazines

The Library owns a wide variety of newspaper and magazine archives. A range of magazines are indexed in the two Readers' Guide databases listed below. Articles discovered with the help of these indexes can be requested through interlibrary loan.

Included below are instructions on how to discover additional newspapers and magazines in the Library's collection and beyond.

Visit the Library's Newspapers & Magazines guide to learn more about research with serial publications. The Library's News guide lists a wide range of current news sources.

Selected Newspaper Archives

Selected Magazine Indexes and Archives

Discover Newspapers and Magazines through Library of Congress subjects

WorldCat is ideally suited for the discovery of serial publications. It employs the same Library of Congress subjects used in Falvey’s Books & Media catalog but includes nearly all English language newspapers and magazines ever published as well as many foreign language news sources.

Library of Congress subjects facilitate the discovery of news publications. Looking up an already known newspaper or magazine is a good way to start. For example, a title search for Middle Earth, one of the many short-lived counterculture newspapers of the 1960s, will retrieve multiple records. Click on the first match to open the full record. The record will have multiple Library of Congress subjects. The generic "Newspapers" is not very helpful but a search that combines the subjects "Underground newspapers" and "Newspapers" will focus search results and produce a list of alternative news media. Alternatively use the Serials limit on the search form. Note that a simple subject search for "Underground newspapers" without the use of the Serials limit will generate a list that includes books about the alternative press.

Subjects in WorldCat records are hyperlinked and call up all records with the same subject. "Underground newspapers -- Iowa -- Iowa City" generates a short list which includes only two titles: The Iowa City Oppressed Citizen and Middle Earth. To broaden your search go back to the search page and delete "Iowa" and "Iowa City" from the search boxes. This will expand the results list to over 400 matches including such papers as the Black Panther, Kudzu, and the Baltimore Free Press. Most of these papers are not available at Villanova University but you may be able to request copies through interlibrary loan. While libraries generally do not loan print issues of newspapers to other libraries, they often share microfilm reels. Limit search results to microform and check to see whether the microfilm is held by a US library, then submit an interlibrary loan request.

The same approach can be used to discover magazines. The Library of Congress subject for magazines is "Periodicals." A search for "Video games" and "Periodicals" in WorldCat retrieves over 600 titles. Some of the periodicals on the list are peer-reviewed academic journals such as Games and Culture as the subject "Periodicals" is used for magazines as well as for academic journals. The vast majority of matches are popular magazines such as Electronic Gaming Monthly and The Official Xbox Magazine given the nature of the subject matter.

Keep in mind the ephemeral nature of many alternative newspapers and magazines. They often started as self-published newsletters and only a few graduated to regular publication schedules and established media distribution channels. The number of libraries that have copies of these newspapers and magazines are limited which may make them difficult to locate. Databases such as The Alternative Press Index (see above) are often the best way to get started.