Newspapers provide a panoramic view of the times they chronicle. The Shasta College Library has an extensive collection of local historic papers on microfilm and a digital microfilm reader available to the public. The digital microfilm reader can create images of newspaper articles which can be saved, emailed, and/or printed. Printing from microfilm costs 10 cents per page. Historians more accustomed to online research are cautioned that using microfilm, which is often brittle and fragile, requires much patience and care.

Newspaper indexing, the process of compiling a newspaper's article titles, authors and topics in a searchable form, is a time-consuming and costly process. While the Shasta College Library does have print indexes for over 150 years of The New York Times and a few decades of the The San Francisco Chronicle, indexes for local papers have not been published. Researchers who do not have a citation for a specific date should be prepared to spend time browsing the microfilm reels covering the time period of interest.

Long runs of some newspapers are also available online via the Shasta College Library's online research database collection and a few open sources on the Internet. Newspaper databases can be accessed both on- and off-campus; from off-campus you will need to log into the Shasta College portal.

The Shasta Public Library also has collections of newspapers on microfilm.  There are some gaps in holdings.