Tisch Talks: E-News Journals

Production Date: (February 2, 2009)

Welcome to Tisch Talks, Tisch Library’s ongoing audio magazine series.  This month we will introduce you to e-newspaper collections and e-journals databases you may not be aware are available through Tisch’s website.  Let’s begin from the Tisch homepage and I will show you how to reach our online newspaper collections.   On the homepage there are 4 resource tabs: Catalog, Articles via databases, E-journal titles and E-books and more.  Choose E-books and more.  Next open the ‘browse by type’ drop down menu and choose ‘primary sources’ and click Browse.    Now you have a list of collections of newspapers, journals, music, documents and other primary source materials in which original material is first disseminated.  Let’s take a closer look at a few of them.

First, I’d like to navigate you to Massachusetts Newsstand.  This database is a subset of the aggregator Proquest and includes many local newspapers.  You can search Lowell’s “The Sun” as well as “The Boston Globe,” “The Boston Herald” and other local papers through ‘Massachusetts Newsstand.’  Scroll through the alphabetical listing to ‘Massachusetts Newsstand’ and click.   You now find yourself on Proquest’s basic search page for Massachusetts Newsstand.  Choose the publications tab at the top of the page to get a list of newspapers in this database and the dates their full-text articles are available.   You can see the Boston Herald has full-text articles available from 1991 and The Sun, second from the bottom, is represented in full text form since 2004.  Let’s click on The Sun.
Now we can search for articles in “The Sun” or browse specific issues.   If you simply want to browse articles from today’s or yesterday’s issue, just click on the appropriate issue date.  If you need to do research on a specific subject, like the Appleton mills in Lowell, and you are interested in articles from 2006, you can find these as well.  Enter your subject, in this case, Appleton Mills, into the text box, select the date range you wish to search, we will choose “specify date range” and specify, 01/01/2006 to 12/31/2006, and hit Search.  Now you have received over 30 articles mentioning Appleton Mills.  If you want to narrow your results, return to the search page and refine your search by choosing “citations and abstracts” in the “look for terms in” menu.  Now instead of gleaning the entire article for your keywords, only the abstract and citation are checked providing you with more pertinent results. 
Let’s browse another of our newspaper collections.  Return to Tisch’s homepage, the E-books and more tab and browse the Primary Sources list for “America’s Historical Newspapers 1620-1922.  In this database you will find newspapers that had short runs, as those from gold rush towns as well as archives of newspapers still in production like Portland’s daily, The Oregonian or Virginia’s The Alexandria Times.  Also included are Spanish language newspapers as well as some German imprints among others.  Unlike in Massachusetts Newsstand, these articles are reproduced as facsimiles with the option to view each article separately or in context of the entire page.  Thus, this is a good place not only to find information about historical events but to gain a perspective of everyday life in the United States during the 18,19th and early 20th century.   As you can see, there are many ways to search this database.  You can begin by inputting keywords and then narrowing the search parameters through the tabs below.  Let’s try an example –type ‘Edison,’ ‘Marconi’ and ‘wireless.’  Next limit the search by era – check the gilded age and populist/progressive eras, and under the “places of publications” tab check Massachusetts.  This returns over 140 results.
Now let’s search a couple e-journal databases.  To find these go back to the Tisch Home page and select Articles via Databases.   The first one I would like to introduce is Alt-Press Watch.   To find it choose the letter A in the browse by title list and scroll down until you reach Alt-Press Watch.  Publications such as Earth First! magazine, the Memphis Flyer and Yoga Journal are included here as well as many other political, social and weekly entertainment titles.  Click Continue to reach the search page.  Now, let’s do a basic search, type  “election 2008 results” in the text box, limit the dates to the last three months.  Click search.  Above the 30 plus results which span a variety of hard-to-find publications from across the country you are given alternate search suggestions to broaden, narrow or alter your results.

You may have noticed Alt-Press Watch is a Proquest database like Massachusetts Newsstand and I’d like to direct you to one more Proquest database, Ethnic News Watch.  We can find it on the Alt-Press Watch search page in the drop-down database menu.  Choose it and you will notice the search page changes just slightly with additional search limiting devices.  In ENW let’s search “Language Instruction”, set the date range for the last twelve months, choose Native People in the Ethnic Group drop-down menu and check “full text documents only.”   You can see these results span numerous Native American publications across the continent since 1990.  For articles between 1960 and 1989 use the database Ethnic News Watch –A History.   Lastly, it is possible to search multiple Proquest databases simultaneously.  To do this, return to the ENW search page click the link “select multiple databases” that follows the database menu.  Now you have a listing of many of Proquest’s databases with boxes you can checkmark to create a multiple database search. 

I hope this installment of Tisch Talks has introduced you to new e-newspaper and e-journal holdings available at Tisch and has provided you with the locations of our many databases which you can use to access other e-resources at Tisch.  Available at the Reference Desk are information sheets with more details about e-resources, database holdings, and searching tips.  Of course, please don’t hesitate to contact your librarian with any questions in person, by phone (617 627 3460), via email or IM by adding TischLibrarian to your contacts.  


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