Welcome to Papers Past

Papers Past contains more than two million pages of digitised New Zealand newspapers and periodicals. The collection covers the years 1839 to 1945 and includes 77 publications from all regions of New Zealand.

There are two main ways to find information in Papers Past: searching and browsing. Searching lets you enter a query term and retrieves articles that contain that term. Browsing lets you look at all the newspapers, starting with a year, a region, or a newspaper title. All the newspaper titles on the site can be searched and browsed.

Getting started

The Getting started page gives an overview of how to use Papers Past.

Go to the Getting started page

How to find out more about our newspaper collection

The newspapers on Papers Past are only a small proportion of New Zealand newspapers. If you cannot find what you are looking for online, it may be available as a paper copy or microfilm. Check the National Newspaper Collection page on the National Library website for more information.

National Newspaper Collection — National Library website

How to find out more about a newspaper

Each newspaper on Papers Past has its own page containing information about the publication, including the date range which is available online and a link to an essay about the newspaper's history. You can find links to all the newspapers on the Browse by title page.

Go to the Browse by title page

Where to find Māori newspapers

The Māori Niupepa Collection is a collection of historic newspapers published primarily for a Māori audience between 1842 and 1932. Digitised copies of these newspapers are available on the New Zealand Digital Library website.

Māori Niupepa Collection — New Zealand Digital Library website

How we select new titles

National Library curators select new newspaper titles for Papers Past based on a number of factors, such as national and regional significance, the availability of paper or microfilm copies of the newspaper, and ensuring a good range of regions and dates. We do not provide recent material because of copyright restrictions.

To find out about our newspaper digitisation programme, visit the Papers Past page on the National Library website.

Papers Past - National Library website

What's new

In August 2012 we added:

In February 2013 we added:

In April 2013 we added:

Acknowledgements

The National Library would like to thank all those organisations that provided the original paper copies to the Alexander Turnbull Library for microfilming.