Introduction

Old newspapers let you look into the past. You can see what people read every day. You can learn what they knew about the world around them. We use old newspapers to understand how people lived, thought and felt in the past. Old newspapers also give us facts about people and events.

Have you ever seen a pile of old newspapers lying around? Maybe you noticed that these papers were starting to turn yellow and even to crumble around the edges. Newspapers are printed on a type of paper called newsprint. This paper contains lots of acid. The acid makes newsprint fall apart after just a few years. That is why old newspapers do not last very long.

Microfilm

When we use newspapers to find out about the past, we almost never look at real copies of old papers. They are large and dirty and difficult to store. They fall apart too easily. Instead, we use microfilms. These are long strips of film, about one inch wide, with very small photographs of each page of one newspaper, such as the Toronto Star or the St. John's Daily News.

When a microfilm is made, each page is photographed, beginning with page one, for example, of Monday, January 1, 1939. Every page of every day is photographed in order. About two months of a daily newspaper fit onto one microfilm reel. Each reel fits into a box about five inches square. This means that years and years of newspapers on microfilm can be stored in just a few filing cabinets.

The pictures of newspapers on microfilms are far too small to read with your eyes alone. To look at microfilms, we use a machine called a microfilm reader. This shines light through a strip of microfilm, and through a magnifying lens. The lens makes the picture bigger. Then the picture is projected onto a screen so you can read it. You move from one page to another by moving the microfilm strip across the lens. Microfilms are sometimes blurry and can be difficult to read.

There are many different kinds of information in newspapers. There are news stories, editorials, letters to the editor, advertisements (ads) and classified ads.