The International Coalition on Newspapers (ICON) is a multi-institutional effort to promote the accessibility and preservation of international newspaper collections by gathering and providing data on physical and digital collections of newspapers from all world regions. ICON was established in 1999 as an international cooperative body under the administration of CRL to support a broad agenda of preservation and bibliographic access.

ICON has supported the efforts of U.S. and Canadian libraries to preserve newspapers from around the globe and make them accessible to scholars and researchers. ICON reformats newspapers through microfilming and digitization, creates bibliographic access, and provides information on institutional news holdings through the ICON database of international newspapers. ICON focuses attention on  significant news collections, identifies important at-risk titles for preservation, and provides a central point of access to information essential for those who make key decisions and policies on library preservation, rights management and digitization.

Funding and support for ICON has come from the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Additional funding and in-kind support is provided by the Library of Congress, British Library, Library and Archives Canada, and a host of other North American repositories.