You can now keyword search old Danish newspapers

Instead of trekking to the Black Diamond to find newspaper articles in print or microfilm that could only be read at the library, University of Copenhagen faculty and students can now access them in digital format.

All University of Copenhagen faculty and students have now been given access to Mediestream, an online service that gives access to the State and University Library’s digital collections of newspapers, radio and TV programmes, as well as commercials shown on TV and in cinemas.

While the content is mostly in Danish, the Mediestream website itself is available in both Danish and English.

Easy access to history

The newspapers have been scanned in a way that renders the text searchable, which allows users to employ keywords and phrases to find articles dating as far back as 1749. The Mediestream newspaper database currently includes 38 different Danish newspapers, some of which are still in circulation today.

The Mediestream database is continually updated. New material, like radio content, is added in as little as two weeks after the original broadcast. Newspapers published after 2015 will be updated on an annual basis, so articles from 2015 will be made available in digital library in 2016. Around one million pages of newspaper content published before 2015 are uploaded each month.

The database currently has almost three million pages, but the State and University Library expects to have over 32 million pages uploaded by 2017. The Mediestream database can be accessed here.