How to Find and Access Newspapers at UA Libraries (2026)

Hi everyone. Today's video will go over several ways you can find and access newspapers at the University of Alabama. First, let's go to the library website by going to lib.ua.edu. Alternatively, you can find the library website by signing into your MyBama account and clicking University Libraries under the quick links tab. To start, let's look at newspaper databases. To find these, come to the databases tab on the library homepage. From here, we can narrow down this huge list of databases to only those that primarily have newspapers within them. To do this, select the drop-down menu on the right side of the screen and scroll down to newspapers. Once here, you can see that we have many databases that offer access to both current and historical newspapers. To get an idea of what kind of newspapers might be in each database, you can look at the database title and read the description underneath it. If you find one of interest, you can click the database title to access it and search within it for any newspapers that you might be searching for. The next way you could try to find access to newspapers would be by looking at our research guides. To locate our research guides, click the research guide icon with a book next to it in the box on the library homepage. There are two guides you may want to search through, the current newspapers content guide or historical newspaper guide. These guides will help pinpoint some databases you might want to search within to find the newspaper you are looking for or may provide a link to some common newspaper titles. For example, we can see here on the current newspaper guide that there is a link to the Washington Post within our collections. If you have a specific newspaper title in mind and want to see if it is in our collection, there are two ways you could do it. First, let's go to Scout, the library search interface. On the library homepage, click the binoculars in the box next to Scout. Once here, click advanced search so that you get this screen with some more filters available. From here, type in the name of the newspaper you are searching for, such as The Guardian. Next, come to the drop-down menu next to the search box and select journal {slash} source title so that the system knows you are looking for a source with the title, not a journal article with the title. Once this is done, click search. Once the search loads, click the first box that says all publication matches and scroll through the results until you find the one you are looking for. In this case, I would click the fourth result that says The Guardian, London, England because the source information below it helps me identify it as the correct source. From here, you could search within the publication or click full text access to see which databases have access and search within those databases. The final way you could look for a specific title is by using the library's publication finder tool. From the homepage, click publication finder. From here, type in the title of the newspaper you are looking for, such as The Guardian. Once the page loads, look through the results until you find the one that looks right. I'm going to click this result that says it's a newspaper and has London, England next to it. From here, click the result and look at all of the databases that provide access to the resource and be sure to note the date range that is available within each one. If you ever need help locating a specific newspaper title, you can reach out to our librarians at ask.lib.ua.edu. Thank you and see you next time.