Guide to Open Access Digitized Historical News Sources from Slavic, East European and Eurasian countries

Compiled by
Bogdan Horbal
Curator for Slavic and East European Collections, The New York Public Library
Ernest A. Zitser
Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies, Duke University Libraries

 What Kind of News Sources Are Included?

This list of websites aims to provide a handy guide to open access historical news sources produced by native and diaspora communities of Slavic, Eurasian, and Eastern European countries. Since such a list cannot possibly claim to be comprehensive, the compilers have selected resources that fit the following set of criteria:

  • Open Access

    • Content that is freely available online and compliant with copyright laws

    • Although the compilers deliberately excluded websites that offer pirated content, in some cases it was not immediately clear whether all institutional hosts represented in this guide resolved copyright issues prior to the online publication of their digitized newspaper holdings

  • Historical

    • Digitized, previously analog sources, and therefore, by definition, those created before the advent of ‘born-digital’ content

    • Excludes many types of contemporary news sources (current online newspapers, blogs, Twitter, etc.)

  • Multimedia

    • Print resources — availability depends on the progress of national and regional digitization projects, which is different for each of the countries included in this guide

    • Audio resources — radio news shows, interviews and speeches contemporary with the original broadcast, as well as transcripts of such broadcasts (where available)

    • Visual resources — TV news shows, newsreels, photojournalism, i.e. historical photos taken by staff members of newspaper/press agencies (where available)

  • News sources

    • Newspapers and news magazines, and therefore, only a specific subset of all published ‘journals’ or ‘periodicals’

    • Same selective principle applies for news programs broadcast by local and national radio or TV stations

This guide does not include contemporary (currently active) news media outlets, a country-by-country list of which can be found on both general (e.g. Newspaperlists.com, w3newspapers.com, Wikipedia) and more specialized websites (e.g. CASPIANA; Library of Congress’ European Division).

How are the News Sources Organized?

The online historical news sources included in this guide are listed country-by-country and arranged in English alphabetical order, from Albania to Uzbekistan. Electronic resources predominantly covering only one country can be found on the page for that country. Those resources covering either the entire region or several parts of the region studied by scholars of Russia, Eurasia, and Eastern Europe are listed on a separate page devoted to trans-regional historical news sources. This is the only section of the guide where such broader, region-wide resources will be listed, so users seeking information about a specific country are also strongly encouraged to consult the page on trans-regional news sources.

  • Trans-regional historical news sources

  • Albania

  • Armenia

  • Azerbaijan

  • Belarus

  • Bosnia and Herzegovina

  • Bulgaria

  • Croatia

  • Czech Republic

  • Estonia

  • Georgia

  • Hungary

  • Kazakhstan

  • Kyrgyzstan

  • Kosovo

  • Latvia

  • Lithuania

  • Moldova

  • Montenegro

  • North Macedonia (formerly Macedonia)

  • Poland

  • Romania

  • Russia

  • Serbia

  • Slovakia

  • Slovenia

  • Tajikistan

  • Turkmenistan

  • Ukraine

  • Uzbekistan

The online historical news sources available for each of the 29 countries included in this guide are organized according to the following categories and arranged in the following order:

  • Print resources

  • Audio resources

  • Visual resources

  • Online catalogs & bibliographies

Contact Us

Precisely because the open web is constantly evolving, a list of open access historical news sources from Russia, Eurasia, and Eastern Europe cannot possibly claim to be either comprehensive or up-to-date.  That is why the compilers of this online guide encourage its users to contact them by email (bogdanhorbal@nypl.org and ernest.zitser@duke.edu) with corrections, suggestions, and possible additions to the list of available resources.

  • If you would like to serve as an editor of one of the country pages, please contact the compilers and let them know what country or region list you are interested in curating.

  • To recommend a website for inclusion in this Guide, please send an email to the guide’s compilers and provide the following information:

    • URL

    • Title

    • Creator(s)/Organization

    • Date coverage

    • Language(s) (if webpage is fully available in that language)

    • Brief description

Acknowledgments

This online guide could not have been compiled without the support and encouragement of numerous individuals and organizations. In addition to their own home institutions (New York Public Library and Duke University Libraries), the authors gratefully acknowledge the contribution of their colleagues in the East Coast Consortium for Slavic Library Collections, particularly the ECC’s webmaster, Anna Arays (Yale University Library) as well as Angela Cannon (Library of Congress), Robert Davis (Columbia/Cornell), and Ksenya Kiebuzinski (University of Toronto). The compilers also benefited from the expertise of the following:

  • The staff of the Newspaper Department of the Russian National Library, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation

  • Lukáš Babka, Director of Slovanská knihovna, Prague, Czech Republic

  • Ognjen Kovačević, Metadata Librarian, Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University

  • Elidor Mëhilli, Associate Professor, Hunter College, The City University of New York

  • Khatchig Mouradian, Area Specialist (Armenia and Georgia), the Library of Congress

  • Smoki Musaraj, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Ohio University

  • Brian Požun, United Nations, New York, N.Y.

  • Andy Spencer, Slavic, East European, Middle Eastern & Central Asian Studies Librarian, University of Wisconsin-Madison

  • Liavon Yurevich, Librarian, Special Collections Processing, New York Public Library

COPYRIGHT STATEMENT

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. This public dedication tool allows others to share the contents of this online guide with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication on the site of the East Coast Consortium of Slavic Library Collections in 2021.