Europeana Newspapers Help Guides

Europeana gives access to explore more than 4 million newspaper records from across Europe. These help guides explain how to navigate, search, browse and find the newspaper content you’re looking for.

This page shows how to:

  • Search for a term in either the full-text or the metadata
  • Search in metadata or full-text only
  • Search for a date range or a single date
  • Download a newspaper page

Search for a term in either the full-text or the metadata

Five million newspaper pages are completely searchable, so you can find articles and headlines on any topic within the text of a newspaper.

To search through all of the articles of full-text newspapers, follow these steps:

  1. Fill in your search term in the search bar on the landing page. By default, the newspapers collection will search only through the newspapers that have full-text available.

  2. Press enter or click the search icon to initiate your search. You’ll see where the word or words you searched for in bold in the result text under each newspaper issue.

  3. When you click on a result issue, you’ll be taken to the record page for that Newspaper issue. You can see where the word or words you searched for are in the Newspaper by scrolling through the full-text transcription of that issue. The word or words you searched for will be highlighted in the transcription.


Search in metadata or full-text only

The newspapers collection defaults to searching through the newspapers that have full-text available. You can search within metadata also by changing the filter.


Search for a date range or a single date

You can use the date filter to find all the newspapers in Europeana from a date range of that from a single date.

  1. Click on the search icon next to the search bar: this brings you to all the newspaper results, without having put in a search term.
  2. Above you should see some search filters. One of them is called ‘Date issued’.
  3. You can either search for a date range, or for a single date. If you search on a date range, enter two dates, and the results you get will be of all newspaper titles that have appeared between those two dates inclusive.
  4. The format you have to enter your date in can be either dd/mm/yyyy, or mm/dd/yyyy, depending on your local computer settings.
  5. If you want to search for a single date, click the radio button called ‘Specific Date’. You should now have the option to fill in a single date.

Download a newspaper page

The newspapers in Europeana come from a lot of different sources and institutions which results in newspapers being available in different viewing and downloading formats.

Newspapers that are fully searchable can be downloaded on a page-by-page basis. You can download a page of a newspaper to use it for your work, share it with others, or re-use and remix it. Every newspaper record page has a download button that will be clickable if you can download the current page of a newspaper.

  • Search or browse through the collection until you’ve found a Newspaper you’d like to download.

  • Clicking the download button will download the page of the newspaper you’re on in an image format like JPEG or PNG. Note that it is currently not possible to download a complete newspaper issue in one click.

  • For newspapers that don’t have full-text search available, newspapers may be downloadable in certain formats. You might be able to download a complete Newspaper issue in PDF format, for instance.

  • Some newspapers might not be available for download at all, either because no suitable format is available, or because the license does not allow for free re-use.

  • In this case, clicking through to the record page of the item on the website of the data provider might give you more access or information. You can click through to the website of the data provider by clicking on the name of the Data Provider on the right of the Share and Download card.

  • Always be careful to follow the instructions under the ‘Can I use it?’ section. Clicking on the copyright icons gives you more information about the specific copyright license attached to the record you are viewing.