It appears the tastes of The Canberra Times readers have changed very little since the paper was first established almost 90 years ago.

Published on September 3, 1926, the first front page of the then weekly paper featured stories on everything from a vicious killing to the capital receiving a chair once used by royalty.

The yellowed and frayed front page - which also curiously detailed the will of a NSW farmer - will be featured in the soon-to-be-opened Treasures Gallery at the National Library of Australia.

Director of exhibitions Nat Williams said there were a lot of international items within the library's collection, but the new gallery offered a chance to highlight local displays.

''We don't really focus much on Canberra,'' he said.

''I thought it was a good opportunity.''

The paper will feature as part of the NLA to Z exhibition, beating out a lot of competition for the letter C.

''We thought here we are in Canberra, it is the nation's capital and we do have the first edition of The Canberra Times,'' Mr Williams said. ''Let's use that as a pointer to say we collect newspapers ... We have millions of newspapers and they're now digitised, available online across the world.'' He said the online collection also allowed readers to correct entries that had been mistakenly transcribed, with well over 100,000 newspaper text corrections submitted just yesterday.