Getting started
Papers Past provides access to digitised copies of historic New Zealand newspapers.
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.
Issues, pages and articles
Each newspaper title was published as a series of newspaper issues. Each issue is made up of one or more newspaper pages. You can view all the newspaper issues and pages in Papers Past.
The newspapers in Papers Past have their pages divided up into articles, advertisements, and illustrations. Every issue has a Contents list that gives you direct access to the articles, advertisements and illustrations.
Browse by date
Use the Browse by date page to find titles published on a certain date. Select a year from the drop-down list, then click on the month you're interested in, and then on the day. A list of the newspaper titles available on this day appears, and you can click on the title you would like to look at. If there are no newspapers available for a month or day, they will not be clickable.
Browse by region
Use the Browse by region page to see which newspapers are available for the places you are interested in. There is a map on the page, which you can click on to see the newspaper titles available for that region. The page also shows newspaper titles with national coverage.
Go to the Browse by region page
Browse by title
This page lists all the newspaper and periodical titles available on Papers Past.
Go to the Browse by title page
Search
The Search page lets you enter a query term and retrieves articles that contain that term. Find out more about using Search on the Search help page.
Printing
Papers Past provides copies of the newspaper issues and newspaper pages in Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format) format that are easy to print. The PDF files are generated automatically at the time you request them, so they can take a long time to generate, especially for newspaper issues with many pages.
The newspaper pages are displayed in reduced resolution so they are easier to download. You can also select a high resolution PNG version of each newspaper page if required.
