Ed: As you know a lot of newspaper archives are available by using libraries in the county seat of the newspaper if a partnership existed between the newspaper and government. Once newspaper libraries kept outside the newspaper office were photo mechanical reproductions usually done by Zerox or other companies that made microfilm spools with one months worth of newspaper pages. Most daily newspapers -- as a public service had two copies made -- one for the newspaper's vault and the other that could be accessed at the public library. It was the civic thing to do back then. Remember, thirty-five years ago that was the technology embraced by newspapers. Prior to that, each newspaper had a librarian who clipped each article, cataloged it and put it in a alpha filing cabinet. A cross-reference card was included in a separate file box that provided a date, headline name, and where it was filed. A reporter wanting to look up past articles about the story he was working on, would access the index, find the file and take the file to his desk to review. It was these filing cabinets that newspapers were approached by third-party data base sellers to have the individual articles scanned into an electronic file. To get access to these files, you can do a search on several websites that house this data to gather information on line after paying a fee or buying a subscription to the data base service. As technology developed, full page scanners were used to scan the bound volumes also in the newspaper's library. The new scanning technique allowed all the stories and advertising to be scanned and cataloged so a search engine could find the material upon a query. To my knowledge, when this partnership is entered, a new copyright is applied to the merged data from the clip files, book volumes and scans of microfilm. I have never heard of a copyright expiring or going away after a certain amount of years since it has become a new revenue stream for newspapers and most have been renewed. And, Ed there are public libraries that subscribe to these databases. If you ask if they have access, you might have some luck accessing them from a computer instead of sifting through microfiche or microfilm spools, and clip copies. Another tool that might be available -- if newspapers didn't discard the old files -- is every daily newspaper used to maintain a separate crime log string book that dealt with all sorts of crime -- murder, rape, burglary, drug busts and possibly raids on illegal gaming. Hope this helps. And, I really enjoy reading your and Gene's research postings -- one of the reasons I joined this organization several years ago.