The following post is by Michael Neubert, Head of the European Reading Room.
It is said that newspapers provide a “first draft” of history; certainly, newspaper collections are a key tool for historical research on foreign countries. Librarians in the European Reading Room and other parts of the Library of Congress spend considerable time ensuring that we continue to acquire, preserve, and make available a selection of titles from countries around the world that will support future researchers, just as the efforts of Library staff in decades past have made it possible for us to provide newspapers covering earlier periods to researchers today.
While the Library of Congress does have some historic newspapers preserved in bound volumes, more typically libraries, including the Library of Congress, have preserved newspapers for future research through microfilming. The Library and other institutions began to microfilm newspapers before World War II and made even greater use of this preservation method thereafter. Newspaper microfilm was deemed an effective way to preserve the contents of newspapers on acidic paper instead of binding large physical newspaper pages that would crumble over time. And newspapers on microfilm could be stored far more compactly than large bound volumes.
In some cases, microfilm of newspapers was produced by commercial companies that would sell the film to libraries, but for many foreign newspaper titles the demand was insufficient to support profitable production and sale of microfilm. For more specialized titles the Library of Congress would step in and subscribe to these newspaper titles and then have the issues microfilmed. (At first Library employees performed the microfilming; more recently contractors have done this work.)
The European Reading Room has custody of more than 25,000 reels of microfilm of newspapers published in Slavic and Baltic languages, and there are hundreds of thousands of reels from other regions as well as the United States held in other parts of the Library. We help researchers identify exactly what we have by providing online research guides that focus on newspapers, such as Russian Newspapers in the Library of Congress. These guides organize information about the Library’s newspaper holdings geographically and then by title. They clarify complexities that can result from newspaper title changes over time and from having been preserved using different formats. They also provide information on newspaper titles that may have been microfilmed and made available as part of large general or subject-specific microfilm sets. Researchers in the European Reading Room view microfilm on reader/printers, although in today’s digital environment they most often use the reader/printer screen capture feature to make digital scans of individual pages or articles rather than printing out paper copies.

Over the past three years, the Library’s approach to preserving and providing access to newspaper materials has shifted from use of microfilming to digitization. Digitization became a suitable approach following the Library’s development of the new Stacks system, a platform that provides controlled access for rights-restricted digital content in the Library’s permanent collection. Stacks includes both original “born digital” content as well as digitized collection materials such as digitized newspapers and books. (This blog post describes Stacks’ use as a platform presenting born digital e-books and this short video describes how to use it when onsite.)
Digitization offers several advantages as a replacement for microfilming of newspapers for researchers. Chief among these is image quality. Newspapers that are digitized from the original paper copies typically provide high quality images of text suitable for optical character recognition (OCR), which can then make the newspaper pages keyword searchable, a feature not available with traditional microfilm. Another advantage is that the digital images of the newspaper pages are in color and the representation of photographs (whether color or black and white) is far better than in microfilm. Digitization also offers processing advantages. To create microfilm of newspapers, the best practice is to accumulate at least a year’s worth of issues at one time. If there are any issues missing, microfilming must be delayed until they arrive because adding them later is difficult. With digitization, missing issues are not a concern because they can be added at any time in the process. As a result, it is possible to digitize newspapers relatively soon after arrival at the Library and make them available in Stacks more quickly than if they had been microfilmed. For example, the title Dnevnik from Serbia has issues available in Stacks from June 2023 (as of September 2024) and the title Glas istre from Croatia has issues available in Stacks from October 2023. Any missing issues for these titles that arrive later can easily be digitized and added to what is available online.
Recently the Library has implemented a new approach to providing foreign newspapers that amplifies the benefits of digitization over microfilm by subscribing to “born digital” versions of print newspapers. These representations of the print newspaper are produced by the publisher in parallel to the printing process, so no reformatting such as scanning or microfilming is needed; the digital version that is presented in Stacks is effectively identical to the print version. Searchable text with the born digital version has the highest possible quality. And since there is no need for the Library to accumulate issues to be sent to a contractor for further processing, the workflow for the Library is simpler and the time from the publication of an issue to when it is available in Stacks is shorter. For example, the Library receives several Bulgarian newspaper titles as born digital files, including 24 chasa and Duma, and in less than six months current issues have been made available in Stacks. In an example from western Europe, the Library is purchasing born digital files for the Danish newspaper Berlingske and has issues through April 2024 available in Stacks.

The Library is also digitizing a limited number of newspapers from microfilm for presentation in Stacks that it had microfilmed from print holdings in the past. This process has the potential to open up decades of microfilmed materials to digital research techniques. So far this effort includes only one Slavic title, Dnevni avaz from Bosnia and Herzegovina, but we expect more to follow. Incoming issues are being digitized as they arrive, while issues from 1997 through 2020 were digitized from the Library’s microfilm and made available via Stacks.
As the Library of Congress has shifted away from microfilm to digitization, it now purchases a relatively small number of titles on commercial microfilm. As a result the amount of microfilm for newspapers in the collections of the European Reading Room is growing far more slowly than in years past. Nevertheless, microfilm of newspapers is an important research resource for patrons in the European Reading Room. As more and more newspaper content is digitized or acquired digitally and made available via Stacks in digital form, reference librarians and specialists in the European Reading Room and elsewhere in the Library will work with patrons to identify and make use of the resources we have available for their research.