Belfast Central Library

I used to live in this place. And that’s almost not an exaggeration. When I did my post-​graduate degree, my dissertation was about newspapers, so there was really only one place I needed to be.
I loved this place. It has, pretty much without exception, a copy of every newspaper printed in Northern Ireland going back centuries. The staff bring you whatever you need (having the result that you don’t have to wade through miles of shelving to find what you’re after!) and there’s also a huge amount of microfilm to hunt through as well, which is handy if you want to print pages out.
For me, the Newspaper Library was an invaluable source of information, but I used to notice lots of other people in there. Some seemed to be chasing their genealogy though birth and death notices, some were on a historical search, like me and some were just catching up on recent back issues of the papers. Brilliant!