Resources online
Some of the early material in the National Library of Scotland's newspapers collection is available online. With a library card you also read and search the digitised full text of a number of titles.
Hundreds of broadsides
Link to broadside
Online you can browse and search through hundreds of broadsides in our special feature 'The Word on the Street'. These forerunners of tabloid newspapers are a popular source of national, local and family information.
Times Digital Archive
A library card gives you full-text access to a small collection of subscribed digital newspaper titles. Of these resources the 'Times Digital Archive 1785 to 1985' is the largest, with over one million pages and more than eight million articles.
You can access these digitised images of 'The Times' newspaper within NLS and from any computer with internet access.
Waterloo Directory of English newspapers and
periodicals
Another digital collection available only to NLS ticket-holders is the 'Waterloo Directory of English newspapers and periodicals: 1800-1900'. This bibliography has details of:
- 50,000 serial publications
- 48,000 personal names
- 4,572 issuing bodies
- 756 subjects.
You can only use this resource within our reading rooms.
See the Newspapers section of our licensed digital collections list for digital resources available with a library card.
Online newspapers
Some Scottish titles are publicly available online. You can access them at Onlinenewspapers.com.
British Library collection
If you are visiting the British Library, you can use the 19th Century British Library Newspapers website free. This has more than one million pages of content. It is also free of charge to all UK Further and Higher Education institutions.
To find out more
For more information about digitised newspaper resources at NLS, please email enquiries@nls.uk.