Papers Past Open Data

Papers Past is a website run by the National Library of New Zealand. It provides free fully-text searchable access to historic newspapers, periodicals and other material.

Some of the newspaper data that sits behind Papers Past has now been openly released. As of March 2025 this consists of the data for 117 newspapers, all published before 1 January 1905. New data will be added each year, normally in March.

The data itself is METS/ALTO XML files, created by the automated Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process. These contain the metadata and the full text of the newspaper issues and are organised by newspaper title, and then by year. If you'd like an introduction to METS/ALTO please go to What is METS/ALTO?

Please note that the datasets do not contain images of the newspaper pages.

You can download the data from the National Library website: Papers Past newspaper open data. CSV files listing all the datasets are also available to download.