Newspapers present a variety of challenges. For much of their history they were considered to be a "disposable" source and were not actively collected by large numbers of institutions.  To further complicate the situation, indexing on newspapers is very limited.  While there are a few indexes of newspaper content , there are only a few.  It is for this reason that scanned, searchable copy of newspapers is highly valued.  One final wrench in the researchers works - newspapers were not always fully cataloged in libraries. In some cases they were simply arranged by title on a shelf.  This continued to be true after microform editions appeared.

If you are trying to find a list of papers that were published during a particular period the print bibliographies are very helpful.  However, a number of the online resources are including either specialized resources for periodicals (e.g., the Russian National Library catalog of newspapers Газеты России (1703 - 1917) ) or have gone to great lengths to get the newspapers cataloged.  These online sources can, therefore be used as a general starting point.  However, you will need to be aware that you are looking at a particular library's holdings not all the newspapers published.

You will also find a few country or regionally specific links below.  These provide the best access to links for the news media for their respective areas.

The sources listed here are some of the best for full texts of literary works for our region.  There are many other sources for newspapers, contemporary journals and other resources.  This will just provide some idea of the material available.  It should be kept in mind that you will often not find titles that would seem essential in electronic form.  There can be a variety of reasons for this but one of the most common is the copyright restriction that precludes the digital reproduction of a work if it is published after 1924 without the express permission of the individual or institution that holds the copyright.  Sources such as Google Books and the Internet Archive have also been omitted from this list although they have numerous titles in the languages of our region.