A Familiar Collection of Historical Newspapers Gets a New Home

Founded in 1990, Accessible Archives provided academic libraries and genealogists access to 18th, 19th, and early 20th century primary sources and historical US newspapers (Accessible Archives, 2023). In 2023, Coherent Digital, publisher of the Commons platforms of gray literature, acquired Accessible Archives and incorporated it into its History Commons product (Coherent Digital, 2023). Although the same archival material is now accessible through History Commons, the changes Coherent Digital has made to its readability and discoverability, for both academic researchers and the general public, are significant enough to warrant examining this well-known resource’s new iteration.

Product Overview/Description

The Accessible Archives material housed within Coherent Digital still features digitized full runs of newspapers and periodicals, providing access to eyewitness news reports, cultural commentary, advertisements, and opinion pieces. Highlights include collections of African American newspapers, first-person accounts of the Civil War, 2,700 volumes of American County Histories, and The History of Women’s Suffrage, by Susan B. Anthony, Matilda J. Gage, and Ida H. Harper. The material also includes full runs of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, with articles by Louisa May Alcott and artwork from Norman Rockwell, and Godey’s Lady’s Book, with works by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edgar Allen Poe, plus the illustrations as originally published (Figure 1).

Legacy Accessible Archives subscribers have access to the full original database, now retitled the Complete Collection of Historical American Newspapers, Books, and Journals.

But that pre-acquisition version of Accessible Archives is no longer available for new purchase. Instead, Coherent Digital has broken out Accessible Archives’ 24 individual collections into standalone subscription products.

As part of the migration into History Commons, every page of the material from Accessible Archives has been rekeyed, allowing users to search both digitized page images and transcribed text. According to Mauricio Elwyn, Coherent Digital’s US West sales director, the company has built its own content object identifier system, so that each document in the collection will have its own permalink, and plans to eventually add AI-generated summaries (M. Elwyn, personal communication, May 20, 2025). All in, the History Commons experience is quite a change—mostly improvements with some drawbacks—from the original Accessible Archives website.

User Experience

If you are a researcher familiar with the original Accessible Archives, you may find using the History Commons version—with its completely different user interface—jarring. The good news is, if you use Coherent Digital’s other Commons products, the search template and features will be familiar.

To get to the Complete Collection of Historical American Newspapers, Books, and Journals module, or any of the other collections within History Commons, users navigate to the Modules tab on the History Commons homepage (Figure 2).

When I click on Complete Collection of Historical American Newspapers, Books, and Journals the collection opens on a search page featuring a simple white search bar with links to the individual collections (“African American Newspapers in the South,” “History of Women’s Suffrage,” or “Quarantine and Disease Control, for example) listed below, under “Included Resources,” as they were titled in the original version of Accessible Archives (Figure 3).

Within the Complete Collection of Historical American Newspapers, Books, and Journals module on History Commons, these individual collections are called “Series” in the search filters menu. The module’s main search page also lists Featured Organizations, which are mainly publishers, although elsewhere on the platform, publishers are referred to as “Sources.” (And if this sounds confusing to you as a reader, you can imagine my confusion as a user.) Happily, the Featured Topics section is more self-explanatory, although some of the listed topics are unavailable without subscriptions to other, additional History Commons modules.

The Advanced Search options, which have recently been updated across all Coherent Digital products, are a marked improvement from the original Accessible Archives search template. They include logical searches, which support keywords, field filters (title, summary, full-text, and author), an option for does/does not appear in, and Boolean operators. The logical search engine defaults to phrasal searching when more than one keyword is used in a field. Users also have the ability to add not just another field (or condition) but a condition group, which makes for much more intuitive, efficient, and effective search statements. For example, I can search for “women’s suffrage” in any field, specifying that results must be written by Susan B. Anthony and mention Elizabeth Cady Stanton, without having to craft a detailed command line search (Figure 4).

There is also a proximity search option, which gives users a template for creating a proximity search with any keyword combination, in any field, near any number of words from each other, no need for special operators. This is a particularly useful function for historical and archival research (Figure 5).

By default, search results display by relevance. Unfortunately, the results sometimes include material from outside the collections ported from Accessible Archives, such as modern-day or paywalled newspaper articles. Coherent believes an initial indexing glitch due to subject overlap with another of the company’s platforms—Policy Commons—caused the mix-up, but, as of June 2025, the problem is still unresolved (M. Elwyn, personal communication, May 27, 2025). In fact, although my institution only subscribes to the Complete Collection of Historical American Newspapers, Books, and Journals module in History Commons, on the advanced search page I am given the option of searching by organizations, document types, languages or countries—like Afghanistan or Latvia—that are clearly outside its scope.

The filters on the results page—for document type, language, year, and country—are more module specific. Although, here, again, some Coherent Commons platform-wide facets are also included, which can lead to confusion: I learned that the original Accessible Archives collections are described as “series” only after finding them, unexpectedly, under the Series facet, while Sources, which sounds like a list of periodical titles, is actually a list of the publishers of the original source material—for example, W.L. Garrison & I. Knapp is listed as a “Source” while their paper, The Liberator, is referred to as a “Series” (Figure 6).

Also somewhat confusing: the “premium” tag indicates rekeyed material, not, as I expected, material that requires subscription access. More helpful is the Mentions facet, which filters for specific organizations or institutions mentioned in an article.

Selecting a document opens a landing page with options to read, share, add to a bibliography, or get a generic Research Information Systems- (RIS-) only citation. Users can also choose to follow the document’s collection for updates (another Coherent Commons feature that is less suitable for archival material) or search further “inside this collection” which, in this instance, means searching within the publisher. The documents themselves are displayed with the rekeyed text first followed by the digitized full pages (Figure 7). The clean, easy-to-read format is an improvement over the original Accessible Archives document display and makes archival research, especially text mining, much more approachable.

Per the 2023 Coherent Commons VPAT, History Commons conforms to the AA Level of both WCAG 2.0 and WCAG 2.1 (Coherent Digital, n.d.). The Library Accessibility Alliance tested African Commons, another Coherent Digital product on the same platform, and found very few compliance red flags beyond correctable color contrast issues (Library Accessibility Alliance, 2023). Overall, keyboard navigation is consistent and effective, which is not always the case for historical document databases. Also helpful for archival material: the texts are readable when enlarged up to 400 percent, and the entire module is viewable in light or dark mode.

Contracting and Pricing Provisions

Full usage rights, including allowances for data mining and unlimited downloads, are included in the cost of History Commons (M. Elwyn, personal communication, Mary 20, 2025). Subscribing institutions are provided a customer portal to access COUNTER 5 usage data. For legacy Accessible Archives subscribers, the customer portal includes pre-June 2023 statistics. The Customer Portal also includes MARC records for individual items. In April 2025, Coherent Digital updated MARC records for all Commons products, including the Accessible Archives collections, to improve keyword tagging and search functionality (Coherent Digital, 2025).

Prices for Coherent Digital products in the Commons line are scaled based on the size and type of institution. The typical model for continuously updated Commons databases is a five-year subscription term with perpetual archive access. As noted, the Complete Collection of Historical American Newspapers, Books, and Journals subscription is a legacy product which, while still supported, doesn’t match any module currently offered from Coherent Digital; instead, Coherent Digital offers separate subscriptions to the individual collections that made up the original Accessible Archives. For non-updating archival collections, like those derived from Accessible Archives, Coherent Digital offers a one-time purchase price. List prices for these collections can run in the mid-five figures, but consortium and bundling discounts are available.

Authentication Models

Coherent Digital uses multiple authentication models for all of its products, including History Commons. Institutions can choose to set up TCP/IP address range authentication, OCLC EZProxy authentication, HAN Server authentication, or SAML (OpenAthens, Shibboleth) authentication. Additionally, individual users can access History Commons via a registered user account set up with their institutional email. If institutions are using TCP/IP authentication for other Coherent Digital products, they do not need a separate authentication process for History Commons.

Competitive or Related Products

Of the historical newspaper archives available for subscription, the two most extensive products are geared equally toward genealogists as historians and student researchers. The largest, Newspapers.com, from Ancestry, features digitized full runs of papers, with ads, comics, articles, and photos that users can share, clip, and save. The 28,000-plus titles in Newspapers.com span 1690–2025 and are discoverable with an especially user-friendly search template, including a results heat map showing where in the US the most relevant articles are (Newspapers.com, n.d.). NewspaperArchive, from Storied, contains more than 16,000 titles from 1607–2025 (NewspaperArchive, n.d.). NewspaperArchive specializes in digitized editions of small town US newspapers and includes around 100 African American newspaper titles.

America’s Historical Newspapers, from Newsbank, offers the complete content of each available issue and a smart timeline-based search tool. Covering 1690 to the 20th century, this database seems more suited for high school students than college researchers (Newsbank, n.d.-a). Newsbank’s product line also includes America’s News—Historical and Current with over 3,500 sources from 1801 to today and America’s News—Local Historical Newspaper Archives, popular with genealogists (Newsbank, n.d.-b).

ProQuest Historical Newspapers: US Collection is a more typical academic database. With an emphasis on complete runs, this database has digitized, full-page, full-issue editions of 130 exclusive local titles from 1785–present day (ProQuest, n.d.). Available without a subscription, the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America project includes an Historic American Newspapers archive with searchable, digitized full pages of papers from the 1790s through 1963 (Library of Congress, n.d.). Chronicling America also offers extensive research guides of archival newspaper articles by location, topic, date, themes, and wars.

The true value of a historical archive, however, depends on the individual researcher’s needs: does the collection include the desired title for the desired time period? There are overlapping titles and years among all of the above products. In many cases, one database picks up where another left off. In the end, researchers are probably best served by having access to several archives, allowing them to patch together their primary sources from multiple historical newspaper databases.

Critical Evaluation

Reviewing the Coherent Digital version of Accessible Archives feels a bit bifurcated: I am evaluating the Accessible Archives material as it appears in History Commons and I am also evaluating History Commons as a platform for archival material. In general, the post-acquisition version of Accessible Archives is an improvement. The Commons search templates are approachable for researchers at any level, and the rekeyed, reformatted material is easy to read, use, and extract. The collection feels updated, streamlined, and, well, more accessible as part of History Commons.

The user interface, however, does present some drawbacks. As already mentioned, shoehorning historical newspapers’ publishers into a “Source” facet is unclear and, in practical terms, basically useless. Worse, there is no obvious option to search by title. While some—but not all!—individual newspapers are listed under “Series,” who equates a newspaper title with the idea of a “series”? Other facets, designed for the gray literature platform, are also unhelpful. The “year” filter on the results page only allows the user to select a specific year (the main search template has an option to search by date range, but that option is not available for filtering results). In fact, for all the results page facets, it was only in the “view more” window that I was able to select multiple options within a filter; for those filters without the “view more” option, I was constrained to making a single selection.

The History Commons platform also does not include a “return to search results” link, forcing users to follow breadcrumbs back along a confusing path of organizations, collections and sources that don’t necessarily reflect the original query. For example, I used the keywords “women’s suffrage” and “Susan B. Anthony” and found a chapter in the Semi-Centennial History of the State of Colorado; but the breadcrumbs walk me back through Lewis Historical Publishing Company and Organizations (Figure 8). And then, if I click on “Home,” I am taken out of Complete Collection of Historical American Newspapers, Books, and Journals module to the History Commons main page; there is no link back to the module’s landing page other than using the Module tab to reopen it. These UI hiccups are all the more glaring in light of Coherent’s obvious effort and, in many cases, success in improving the usability of Accessible Archives.

Recommendation

Accessible Archives remains an indispensable resource for research by students and faculty in history, African American studies, American studies, and gender and women’s studies, as well as anyone interested in firsthand accounts of American life in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.

Given the often scattered, piecemeal, and difficult-to-find nature of newspaper archives, the original Accessible Archives stood out as a thoughtfully curated database with deep runs of desirable titles. All that remains mostly true, and often improved, within History Commons. It is too bad that Accessible Archives, as legacy users know it, is only available à la carte to newly subscribing institutions, as the upgrades by Coherent Digital add real value to the collection.

References

Accessible Archives. (2023, August 13). About us. https://web.archive.org/web/20230813084628/www.accessible-archives.com/about-accessible-archives/

Coherent Digital. (n.d.). Our commitment to digital accessibility. Retrieved May 28, 2025 from https://coherentdigital.net/support/accessibility

Coherent Digital. (2023, June 15). Coherent Digital LLC acquires Accessible Archives Inc [Press release]. https://coherentdigital.net/about-us/press-and-news/press-release-june-15-2023

Coherent Digital. (2025, April). MARC records update spring 2025. https://coherentdigital.net/support/marc-update-april-2025

Library Accessibility Alliance. (2023, April 21). Africa Commons. https://libraryaccessibility.org/evaluation/africa-commons

Library of Congress. (n.d.). Chronicling America. Retrieved May 19, 2025 from https://www.loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america/about-this-collection/

Newsbank. (n.d.-a). America’s Historical Newspapers. Retrieved May 19, 2025 from https://www.newsbank.com/schools/solutions/core4/americas-historical-newspapers

Newsbank. (n.d.-b). America’s News. Retrieved May 23, 2025 from https://www.newsbank.com/public/solutions/us-national-local/americas-news

NewspaperArchive. (n.d.). About NewspaperArchive. Retrieved May 19, 2025 from https://newspaperarchive.com/about-us/

Newspapers.com. (n.d.). All publications. Retrieved May 19, 2025 from https://www.newspapers.com/papers/

ProQuest. (n.d.). ProQuest Historical Newspapers: U.S. Collection. Retrieved May 23, 2025 from https://about.proquest.com/en/products-services/hnp-usstate-collections/