image “Newspapers B&W (3)” taken by Jon S. Downloaded 01/12/14. Available from Flickr under a Creative Commons licence.
Main Library
The following daily papers can be found in the Library Lounge on the ground floor of the Main Library: Daily Telegraph, Saturday Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph , Times Financial The Times, Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Observer, Times Higher Education
A larger range of papers are kept on the Third Floor with older copies as microfilms.
Orchard Learning Resource Centre (OLRC)
The OLRC subscribes to The Times and The Guardian on a daily weekday basis along with The Birmingham Post on Thursdays only. Current issues are displayed near the Lending Desk. The Times Educational Supplement arrives weekly, and is shelved amongst the journals on the first floor under S.370 TIM. They are kept for three months before being discarded.
Daily newspapers are an important source of information on current events, opinions, theatre, film and book reviews and obituaries, but do be aware that they are aimed at a general audience and written by journalists rather than experts. Newspaper articles can be inaccurate and can often be biased in support of a particular point of view or political party so they need to be used with caution.
Back issues of newspapers can also be useful as historical source material. Archival content is usually on a separate website from current content so you may have to look in several places.
Newspaper articles can be searched for by using certain indexing databases, for example:
Nexis Advance UK is primarily a business and legal information database, but one of its major features is a substantial corpus of full-text British, European and US newspapers. From the Sources drop-down menu on the search screen you can select specific categories of newspapers such as UK national or regional newspapers. The More Sources link allows you to select newspapers in specific languages or individual newspaper titles to search. Nexis UK currently has newspapers in Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish (including South American).The full text files of most newspapers go back over the last 10-20 years.
The following links take you to the websites for these newspapers. Most will have some articles available to read for free but other articles may have to be paid for. Many will also be available from Nexis Advance UK.
The Daily Record and Sunday Mail