Newspaper Directories

One of the difficulties researchers run into when beginning newspaper research is that they don't know which newspapers to seek out because they don't know what was being published, or where. Newspaper direc­tories are designed to solve that problem and, depending on the particu­lar directory, a few other problems as well.

Because of the nature of newspaper research, directories are organized geographically. This means that it is possible, and easy, to find the names of newspapers published in a Connecticut town during a given period. Directories by and large provide location information as well.

A word of caution is helpful when it comes to location information. While statements about the history of newspapers—the fact that they were published in a certain place during a certain period by a certain person or persons— are generally reliable, location notations can become outdated. They can also be wrong in the first place. Over time, libraries run out of space and throw away materials they had reported as part of their holdings; or they microfilm materials they had previously held in hard copy. Libraries also acquire old newspapers subsequent to the publi­cation of relevant directories. There is no need for cynicism in using newspaper directories but, as with many other research tools, it is good to keep their deficiencies in mind.

Probably the most impressive newspaper directory is Clarence Brigham's History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820 (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1947). Historical notes about each of the 2,120 items are full, including title, title changes, date of establishment, and names of editors and publishers. Location informa­tion is given by the libraries' abbreviated symbols, with a key to abbrevia­tions. The Connecticut section, pp. 11-76 in volume 1, lists 88 titles pub­lished in Connecticut cities and towns during the period. In 1961, Brigham published a fifty-page pamphlet updating and correcting his bibliography. The nine new titles he found are in Additions and Corrections to History and Bibliography of American Newspapers. A companion to Brigham, covering the same dates, is Edward C. Lathem, Chronological Tables of American Newspapers, 1690-1820 (Worcester, Mass., 1972). This is a guide to the appearance of American newspapers year by year in that 130-year span. Both are published by the American Antiquarian Society.

Continuing from where Brigham stopped in 1820 is Winifred Greg­ory's American Newspapers, 1821-1936 (New York, H. W. Wilson, 1937). In covering a larger number of newspapers, Gregory sacrificed much of the historical notation that makes Brigham's work special. Still useful as guide to what was published and where, Gregory's is a skeleton of Brigham's set. Location information in Gregory includes 5,700 re­positories and, although these are useful, the surge in newspaper micro­filming in recent years has outdated much of Gregory's information about the holdings of hard copy. Many libraries discard hard copies once microfilms have arrived.

Answering the need for some bibliographic and location control of microfilmed newspapers is Newspapers in Microform: United States, 1948-1972, and 1973-1977, Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1973 and 1978. This is a union list of newspapers on microfilm, microfiche, and microcard reported by 843 libraries across the country and about fifty commercial firms. In all, this ambitious directory includes nearly 35,000 titles. The arrangement of Newspapers in Microform is essentially the same as in Brigham and Gregory—that is, by state and then by city. Each entry gives dates of publication; title changes, if any; location; holding nota­tions, which include the inclusive dates of a repository's run of a newspa­per; and an indication of the type of microform—that is, microfilm (mas­ter or copy), microfiche, etc. In the years 1978 and 1979, the Library of Congress issued supplements to Newspapers in Microform, which they hope to continue annually. In the 1978 supplement, some 1,000 titles not previ­ously listed are included, twelve of them Connecticut newspapers. These items are not new papers but new or additional locations of older newspa­pers, newspapers put on microform since the publication of Newspapers in Microform, 1948-1972, or corrections of items in that volume.

These three newspaper directories—Brigham, Gregory, and Newspa­pers in Microform—provide sufficiently complete chronological coverage for discovering by place the titles of newspapers published, along with in­formation pertaining to the papers' publishing histories, as well as loca­tion information about both hard and microtext copies.

In addition to these comprehensive newspaper directories, there are several that list newspapers of a special nature. Primarily these are papers that appeal to a particular ethnic readership, and the directories have pulled some of these more esoteric titles together. German-American Newspapers and Periodicals, 1732-1955 (2d rev. edition, Heidelberg, Quelle and Meyer, 1965), by Karl Arndt and May Oldon, is an example of the more ambitious ones. This revised edition adds an interesting ap­pendix to the first edition (published in Germany in 1961), which is a list of World War II refugee and prisoner-of-war-camp publications. In the main section, about 5,000 titles are grouped by state and city, with fairly extensive notations about title changes, editors, publishers, size, circulation, and location.

These special lists of ethnic newspapers are all very different from one another. For instance, in contrast to Arndt and May's 810-page German-American directory is the fifty-six-page-list of Jewish newspapers and periodicals put out by the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Reli­gion. The American Jewish Periodical Center there is attempting to microfilm all Jewish newspapers and periodicals published in the United States before 1925, and these films are listed in the directory. The films are also available for borrowing on interlibrary loan. So, while this list seems modest in comparison with the Arndt and May list, it represents a substantial collecting and filming project.

Libraries Unlimited, a publisher of bibliographic and reference sources based in Littleton, Colorado, has compiled a directory of all the ethnic serial publications. The Encyclopedic Directory of Ethnic Newspapers and Periodicals in the United States (1972) arranges titles alphabetically ac­cording to ethnic groups and includes papers published in English, as well as those in foreign languages.