Accessing Historical Newspaper Articles Online
Locating specific information using a search engine can sometimes lead to frustration, as you continuously attempt to enter just the right keywords and wind your way through a barrage of irrelevant results. The library can help with a wellspring of information resources to narrow your search and eliminate unwanted results.
The Glendale Library, Arts & Culture Research page is a good place to start. By first identifying the subject or type of information you're seeking, you've already improved the chances of retrieving relevant hits. There is a variety of databases to choose from, and the Proquest databases are especially useful when it comes to researching current and historical information in articles and newspapers.
Thanks to the ProQuest database, we have access to a large supply of digitized reproductions of archived articles from the Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Times, New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Proquest Historical Newspapers is the definitive newspaper archive, and it has allowed researchers not only to view historical materials such as articles, photos, advertisements, classified ads, obituaries, editorial cartoons, but to study the progression of events and viewpoints through time.
The Los Angeles Times (1881 - 1993) - ProQuest Historical Newspapers is one our most popular databases, providing millions of pages of regional news dating back to 1881.
Tips for getting the best results using ProQuest Basic Search
Keyword search
Enter your selected subject or terms into the search bar, and Proquest collects all of the articles where those keywords match. The more words in your search, the more narrow the search. For example, a search for "Garden" might give you too many results, but searching "Community Garden" will lead to more focused results, and a search for “Community Garden Glendale" would be even better. To give you an idea, searching Garden returns 1,122,252 results. Searching Community Garden returns 192,063 results, and searching Community Garden Glendale returns 58,043 results.
Using quotation marks
Let’s say you searched the term Community Garden and the results offered articles about a community and a garden. Or a community. Or a garden. Putting your search terms in between quotation marks will ensure the keywords are searched exactly as is, so the articles containing the terms "Community Garden" in that exact order will be retrieved. The search for community garden without quotes returned 192,063 results. With quotes, “community garden” returned 662 results.
Limit the dates
After the search results are retrieved, you can narrow your search even further using the date range on the left side of the window. All of the publishing dates for the articles that came back from your search are arranged by decade and graphed to give you an idea of when your inquiry had the most publishing attention. If you just want to see results from one decade, you can click on the corresponding bar. If you wanted to narrow that search to twenty or thirty years, two-to-three decades, you can move the gray sliders under the dates bar chart to give it a range. Make sure to hit Update to refresh the search.
Arrange your results by date published or relevancy
Once your search results are back, you can make sorting through them easier by arranging them either by date published (either by most recent first or oldest first) or relevance. These three options appear in a pull-down menu to the left of your search results.
If you have additional questions as you start exploring our research resources, please reach out to Glendale Library, Arts & Culture staff at LibraryInfo@GlendaleCA.gov or by calling 818-548-2021.