Wisconsin InfoLink is an almanac of Wisconsin facts and resources compiled by Ron Larson. Each week on the WisconsinWatch blog, Larson introduces us to some of these gems.
Earlier in August I mentioned that there would be an announcement regarding a major addition to BadgerLink and here it is.
As some of you might have heard, BadgerLink — the state’s online full-text library collections — now has access to five years of complete PDF pages from more than 250 Wisconsin newspapers, dailies and weeklies. This is a major breakthrough for those of you who need to search back issues of newspapers, as very few weeklies have any searchable archives and most dailies have extremely poor ones.
If you have a Wisconsin library card or if your Internet provider is Wisconsin-based, you should have no problem gaining access to this incredible collection of newspapers. If you have neither, just visit your local library (public or academic), as long as it is in Wisconsin. You’re out of luck if you live outside Wisconsin.
For your convenience, you can always get to BadgerLink through Wisconsin InfoLink’s Education tab.
How to get there: Wisconsin InfoLink: Education > BadgerLink > Resources by type > Newspapers > Wisconsin Newspapers Digital Research Site
If you have a Wisconsin Internet provider or if you are accessing BadgerLink from a library, you will be taken directly to the site. If not, you will need to choose the link “Wisconsin Library Card” and, at the prompt, type in your library barcode number.
The default option is to search all newspapers, but you can also filter by a specific newspaper.
The collection goes back to March 2005 and will continue to grow as current editions are added to the database. There is a 60-day embargo placed on the newspaper pages, so the most recent issues to search will always be two months old.
All in all, the BadgerLink collection of Wisconsin newspapers is a powerful research tool. Besides being available through the DPI’s BadgerLink site, the pages are in the process of being archived at the Wisconsin Historical Society, where I work.
This is the first in a series of blog postings on searching for newspaper content. Next time I’ll discuss another resource available through BadgerLink … Newspaper Archive. Until then, happy searching.
The nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with Wisconsin Public Radio, Wisconsin Public Television, other news media and the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by the Center do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Credit should be given, in this format: “By Dee J. Hall, Wisconsin Watch”
- If published online, you must include the links and link to wisconsinwatch.org
- If you share the story on social media, please mention @wisconsinwatch (Twitter, Facebook and Instagram)
- Don’t sell the story — it may not be marketed as an individual product.
- Don’t sell ads against the story. But you can publish it with pre-sold ads.
- Your website must include a prominent way to contact you.
- Additional elements that are packaged with our story must be labeled.
- Users can republish our photos, illustrations, graphics and multimedia elements ONLY with stories with which they originally appeared. You may not separate multimedia elements for standalone use.
- If we send you a request to change or remove Wisconsin Watch content from your site, you must agree to do so immediately.
For questions regarding republishing rules please contact Andy Hall, executive director, at ahall@wisconsinwatch.org
