It would be great if every edition of every old newspaper had been preserved, even better if they had been preserved in perfect condition.
It's worth noting that British Newspapers did not always publish on certain Christian religious holidays such as Good Friday and around Christmas (If in doubt, you can check the issue number [usually] on the front page).
Sadly, we can't always find a copy of some issues (or a run of issues). It can be frustrating to look for the Newspaper from a specific date only to find that it isn't there, so to help you identify the periods where UKPressOnline is not as complete as we would like we will keep the following list as up-to-date as possible. We have rescanned the missing pages from 1960 and are generally pleased with the quality. There are a number of damaged originals, however, we will continue to search for better quality originals. Please note that the following list is not yet complete; an audit of missing pages/editions is underway (current status - Express 1900 - 1965 completed):
Missing Editions Status:
The Daily Express
Missing :
1906: 17 March; 19 October;
1907: 18 April;
1908: 13 April;
1917: 26 June; 18 & 31 December;
1918: 21 January; 7 March;
1926: General Strike: not published 05-06 May, reduced pagination and smaller sheet size between 07-13 May;
1932: 25 March;
1945: 10 May;
1946: 8 June;
1949: 9 Sept;
1961: Incomplete issues: 24 Mar missing pp1-14; 3 April missing after p3; 20 June missing after p6; 21 Aug missing after p3; 28-31 Oct incomplete, missing left-hand pages; 7 Nov missing pp1-5; 16 Nov missing after p17; 21-24 Nov missing some left-hand pages; 29 Nov missing pp1-14;
1962: 14 Feb missing after p6; 15 Feb missing; 1 Nov missing p15; 10 Dec missing p2;
1963: 15 June missing p4; 3 Aug missing p7;
1964: Nov 17 missing p15;
1966: (missing January and May), 26-30 Nov;
1967: 8 May;
1969: 21-29 Nov;
1970: Missing due to Strike Action: 10-14 June
1971: 09-16 June; 02-31 Aug; 20-23 Sept; 12 Oct; Missing due to Strike Action: 1 Mar; 18 Mar
1972: 01-29 Feb; 24-27 July;
1973: 1 May
1974: (missing January);
1975: 28 Mar; 01-31 May; 01-31 July;
1978: 21-31 Mar;
1983: (missing part January, April);
1995-1999: (missing back-pages, currently being added);
2000: (missing Jan-19 May);
2008: missing mid-August through to late September.
We are now scanning a large number of missing editions from the above list as well as re-scanning a large number of editions from better quality originals;
The Church Times
The Church Times' archive is now effectively complete. We are auditing the archive now; a detailed PDF of missing pages will be available for download before the end of 2018. Those listed here are missing:
1871 is missing pages 122, 466, 467;
1901 the second volume is missing pages 668-669;
1907 the second volume id missing pages 871-872;
1912 the first volume is missing pages 202, 293, 373-380, 407, 492, 651;
1913 the first volume is missing pages 490, 909-910;
1913 the second volume is missing page 909;
1916 the first volume is missing pages 300-301;
1918 the second volume is missing pages 72-73;
The audit is ongoing and will continue to list later years' information.
Index pages are being added and will be available soon, free of charge to all users.
Now available:
Church Times Volume 1 Index from 1863, 4-pages, size=899KB;
Church Times Volume 2 Index from 1864, 4-pages, size=9.5MB;
Church Times Volume 3 Index from 1865, 4-pages, size=1.1MB;
Church Times Volume 4 Index from 1866, 4-pages, size=808KB;
Church Times Volume 5 Index from 1867, 4-pages, size=857KB;
Church Times Volume 6 Index from 1868, 4-pages, size=842KB;
Church Times Volume 7 Index from 1869, 4-pages, size=960KB;
Church Times Volume 8 Index from 1870, 4-pages, size=624KB;
Church Times Volume 9 Index from 1871, 4-pages, size=12.7MB;
Church Times Volume 13 Index from 1875, 4-pages, size=5MB;
Church Times Volume 14 Index from 1876, 4-pages, size=2.4MB;
Church Times Volume 15 Index from 1877, 4-pages, size=2.3MB;
The Watchman (and Wesleyan Advertiser)
The Watchman archive is now effectively complete and is currently missing only a few pages, those listed here are missing:
1855 is missing pages 146-149, 221-236;
1856 is missing pages 153-154;
1858 is missing pages 145-146;
1867 is missing pages 147-154;
1868 is missing pages 154-155;
1871 is missing pages 243, 244, 253, 254;
1872 is missing issue 517;
1873 is missing pages 153-154 & issue 527;
1883 is missing pages 259, 260, 269, 270.
Sunday Express
The Sunday Express is available from 2000 to current; as we add other issues the complete archive will become available. Issues are also available from: 1921; 1930; 1934; 1937; 1939 to 1944; 1976 to 1982.
To allow automatic access to UKPressOnline we may need to set the archive to recognise your IP range when users access the website. This may be a single IP address for a proxy server or may be a series of IP addresses/ranges.
Off-campus access can be provided to your authenticated users via a link on your e-resources/library page. Off-campus access options include a proxy connection, UK Federated access (such as Athens and Shibboleth) as well as WAYFless URLs.
Users can currently search the UKPressOnline database for pages of The Church Times, Daily Worker, Morning Star, Daily Star, The Watchman (1835-1885), Daily Express from 1900, Sunday Express from 2000, Action, Blackshirt, Fascist Week and the WWII editions of the Yorkshire Post (subject to Subscription limitations); just type a search term (e.g. Blair) into the Search box on the Home page and the database will tell you how many pages there are on which this term was mentioned and show you thumbnail results. You may also search for newspapers from a date: enter the date into the 'Simple date search' box to see what we have.
Note that, if you search for Blair, you’ll find Sir Ian Blair, Lionel Blair and The Blair Witch Project, as well as Tony Blair; if you want only the ex-Prime Minister, your search term should be: Exact Phrase Tony Blair. If you are not a registered user with UKPressOnline or haven’t logged in with your Username and Password, you can see only the thumbnails. If you want to see more, or do an Advanced Search – multiple search terms, date search, front-pages only, see Preview pages and scroll through editions, create your own Bookshelf – you have to Register and logon. To Download/use full PDF pages you'll need to purchase access. For a detailed 'how-to', look at our Help pages:
http://www.ukpressonline.co.uk/ukpressonline/help
If you search for Tony Blair, the database can find all pages on which the Exact Phrase Tony Blair is mentioned; it will ignore any mentions where the writer may have referred to the ex-Prime Minister (albeit disparagingly, perhaps) as simply Blair. Select Any Word to find results which contain Tony or Blair. Using the advanced search screen there is the option to add extra search criteria – e.g. Tony Blair and George Bush and Jack Straw and Iraq; this will return only pages that mention all of these names. Each of the added search boxes further gives the option to amend its Boolean operative – and, or and not so, if you want every page that mentions Blair or Bush, Search for Tony Blair, change the drop-down operative from and to or, and type in George Bush. If you want only those Tony Blair pages that have nothing to do with George Bush, change the operative to not. You can use any combination of these; if you find you need more criteria, please let us know.
The database defaults search in to Body Content - i.e. search all pages of every edition; Change this drop-down to Front Page to restrict the search to front pages only. If you’re looking for David Beckham but don’t want football reports, you can save a lot of time by restricting your search to front pages only. Be aware that some editions are missing the front page (occasionally we have to remove pages for legal reasons) so their editions will not show-up in your results. use the 'Next-' and 'Previous Edition' buttons in the Edition Preview View to browse through editions.
You can opt to search for a specific date or for newspapers within a range of dates by entering the Date from and Date to fields on the advanced search screen. Dates can be entered directly as text DD/MM/YYYY (Day, Month, Year) or you can click on the calendar icon beside the date boxes to pick the date/s required from a pop-up calendar.
Note: If you simply want to find and scroll through an edition or range of editions without entering any search text click By date alone. When used in combination with setting Search in to Front page and Sort by to Oldest edition this is a powerful tool when finding coverage of major events.
UKPressOnline defaults to returning all found pages in order of relevance – ie, pages with the most mentions of your search criteria; if you want your pages in latest to oldest date order change the Sort by drop down to most recent edition, alternatively if you want the reverse date order choose oldest edition. You may also choose to view results as a Thumbnails only, Gallery with highlighted text-in-context or list with text-in-context.
Once you have downloaded the PDF files of pages, you don’t need to be connected to UKPressOnline or even to the Internet to search through them; you can use Acrobat’s Advanced ‘Search/Find’ to search the text in the document you have open – or even in all PDF files in a directory on your computer at once.
The first line on this page tells you how many hits your search has found – how many pages on which your search criteria appear. If this is too many (e.g. a search for Tony Blair and no other criteria will find thousands of hits, which will take an awful lot of your time to go through), you can click New/Refine Search, which will take you back to the search screen you last left, where you can refine your search by adding extra criteria. This option is present in all following screens. The next line shows your search criteria. Hits are shown as thumbnails, usually eight per page (if you have a large screen you can see more results per page ). Navigation control icons are provided for Next, Previous, First and Last results. The Title, Date of publication and Page number of each page appears above its thumbnail. You can also view as pages of thumbnails only; a gallery with highlighted search-term text or a list with highlighted search-term text.
Below each thumbnail, there are four options:
There are also buttons to view the 'next' and 'previous' issues once you are viewing the edition preview.
This view shows the thumbnail page and its facing page (where there is one – i.e. not Front or Back page) at roughly double the size of the thumbnail; as well as this, thumbnails of all of the pages in that edition are shown in spreads down the right-hand side. You can scroll backwards or forwards through the edition by choosing Previous or Next; you can also choose to Jump to a specific spread or to Front Page or Back Page. At each stage the chosen page appears in the main view in Preview size.
By clicking on the buttons under each thumbnail you have the following options:
Search Result returns you to the thumbnail views, at the last set of thumbnails where you transferred to Preview.
To use the Bookshelf you must have a subscription to an Archive.
Search results' thumbnails and their search context can be stored in My Bookshelf for future reference; if you log off and log back on, they will still be there.
The first line on this view shows how many pages you have on your Bookshelf. You can scroll through views of eight thumbnails (in the order in which you added them) and go to Preview, Download or New/Refine Search, as before.
You can delete thumbnails from My Bookshelf by clicking Remove under the relevant thumbnail.
The “pre-computer” pages in UKPressOnline – from 1835 to 2001 – are scanned from the original paper editions or from microfilm images of the pages and have been ‘OCR’d’ (Optical Character Recognition) to make the text available. These images are dependent on the quality of the original. We do have many issues of the newspapers where the quality of the original is very low but we are continuously upgrading these where possible; currently the focus of this is the Daily Express (from 1934 to 1946) where we have obtained a better quality set of microfilm.
From 2001, most (but not all) of the pages are in ‘Print’ format PDF – the actual computer files from which newspaper pages are now printed: as such, they give production-quality reproduction, both on-screen and on reprint.
Picture files (TIFF, PICT, JPEG, GIF etc.) have no text content: a database of picture files allows you to search only by ‘keywords’ that have been applied to each picture by the database provider. We have made the entire original newspaper content fully searchable so you can search what was published, look at pages, download them and, using the power of Adobe Acrobat®, refine your searches or perform new ones – offline.
You can access some of UKPressOnline's archives for Free.
The South Eastern Gazette archive (1852-1912) is currently free in the UK as it is supported by 'Your Heritage Lottery Fund'
Vouchers offering free trial access are often available. We also regularly offer Voucher codes which allow access at reduced cost. Keep an eye out for these codes via our email (make sure you have subscribed to the email via your 'My Account' page), Facebook and Twitter.
To see all the available pricing options select the 'Prices' link from the top of the page.
Universities and Further Education Institutions can buy access for students and faculty.
The UKPressOnline Archives are available through JISC Collections.
Please see:
JISC Catalogue for UKPressOnline (Annual Access)
JISC Catalogue for UKPressOnline (Perpetual Licence)
If you've set up an account by going through the 'Register' process but haven't had an email to confirm that your account is active there are a few things to check.
It is likely that your account has been correctly set-up. You should log in with your username and password and check the details in the 'My Account' page.
Your account is automatically activated when you register. You are then able to use the Advanced Search function to find editions by date, date range and/or text. You can search for a word or phrase on a particular date or in a range of dates (from one day to a later day).
If you would like to purchase a subscription giving you access to edition previews, large previews and, of course, to the high-resolution PDF files, as well as extra facilities, see the Prices menu for more details.
To buy a subscription, email octavia@ukpressonline.co.uk
You can find details of the prices for annual or six-monthly subscriptions in the prices section, as well as pricing for single pages.
If you do not have a registered account with us you will be asked to set-up a user account choosing a user-name and a password. If you already have an account with UKPressOnline you can proceed straight to the payment stage. Please review your selections carefully before confirming your payment.
Library, Education and larger Business customers should contact the Subscriptions Desk directly.
See our Links page: from there, you can email the syndication desk of the Express with details of the photograph – the title and edition in which it appeared and a brief description. For other publications, you’ll have to contact the publisher direct. Please note however that it may not be possible to supply certain images for various reasons, including copyright being held by a third party.
We have made great efforts to ensure compatibility with most Web Browsers, whether Windows, Mac or Unix/Linux-based. Firefox, MS Edge and Safari are recommended.
Firefox: To enable PDF pages to be viewed correctly (with search-terms highlighted) you will need to tell Firefox to use the Adobe PDF plugin rather than the built-in PDF viewer.
Google Chrome: Although Chrome works for most functions, it is not recommended if you are viewing PDF files (search-terms are not accepted by the PDF Viewer in Chrome.
Safari: Note that you may have to switch the 'use Javascript' option back on after updating Safari.
If you have problems with your preferred browser, please email us at Technical Desk. For best performance we recommend allowing javascript and site cookies in your browser. UKPressonline has been designed to support limited operation without the use of cookies, however we do require javascript to be enabled.
For any technical problem, please email us at Technical Desk with us much detail[1] on the problem as you can supply; it helps if you can also supply any information on your own equipment that might be relevant – such as:
For specific issues, any additional information that can assist us in recreating the problem would be appreciated.