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Bulgarian Newspapers in the Library of Congress

Bulgarian Newspaper Indexes

This guide is intended to help identify Bulgarian newspapers, but this section is devoted to discovering the content of those newspapers. For born digital or digitized newspapers, some form of keyword searching is usually available, but what about newspapers that are still available only in an analog form such as print or microfilm? Or titles that are digital, but exist behind a firewall? For those titles, some sort of index is needed to determine if they might be of value for research. Listed below are an online catalog with newspaper article citations and the two main printed sources for locating citations for articles published in Bulgarian newspapers. Together, they all form part of the Bulgarian national bibliography.

Online Index

In the online catalog of the Saints Cyril and Methodius National Library of Bulgaria in Sofia (part of the COBISS Bulgaria union catalog) there are records for article citations from the two article series mentioned above, as well as more recent article citations from the era after the indexes ceased in print. Because this catalog sometimes uses abbreviations for periodical titles and also makes it hard to search by the source in which the article was published, it is easier to search for articles on a particular subject rather than articles from a particular newspaper. The catalog must be searched using Cyrillic characters. The catalog includes article citations from 1992 to the present. Just as the corresponding print version of Series 6 of the national bibliography, this catalog indexes the contents of periodicals selectively. The catalog also contains bibliographic records and holdings for the periodicals themselves as represented in the collections of the National Library.

Print Indexes

From 1952 until 1971 newspapers and journals were indexed in the same source, Letopis na periodichniia pechat LNPP), but beginning in 1972 each genre received its own index, with the newspaper articles appearing in Letopis na statiite ot bulgarskite vestnitsi (LNSOBV). Both of these titles arrange the citations into broad subject categories and provide name indexes. During some, but not all, years the indexes in each issue were collated into an annual index. The indexes are much easier to use for finding a specific piece of information than for locating articles on a topic -- unless that topic is quite broad in nature. In addition, each issue provides a list of the newspaper titles and issue numbers that it covers. Readers should keep in mind that the indexes cover only central Bulgarian newspapers and a few major regional newspapers. They also provide citations for selected articles only. Thus when the newspaper title index indicates that a specific issue of a newspaper is indexed in Letopis na statiite ot bulgarskite vestnitsi it does not mean that all of the articles published in that issue are cited.