| A Newsletter of the Reference Services Division, Olin·Kroch·Uris Libraries, Cornell University | |
| Vol. 9, No. 1 | Winter 1999 |
Finding newspaper coverage of events can be complicated. Different indexing and searching resources are needed depending on the date and the geographic location of the event and the perspective desired. Public indexing of many newspapers is a relatively recent phenomenon, complicating matters further. Summarized below are a variety of resources related to 20th-century news coverage, including Web sites, online databases, and print and microfiche indexes. Starting with today's news we have arranged these summaries in reverse chronological order. We will continue our focus on this topic in an upcoming issue of Cite & Byte by providing summaries of available resources on ethnic, international, and early American newspapers.
Today's News: Until recently, coverage of breaking news was available only through broadcast and cable television and radio news services. In the last few years, television news organizations (CNN, MSNBC) have developed Web sites that offer access to current news, sports, and weather information. Newspapers soon followed suit with Web sites that offer access to many of the stories that appear in their daily printed papers. The Reference Services Division maintains links to selected news services on the News Sources section of our Internet Reference Resources page.
Post-1980 News Coverage: Comprehensive indexing by computerized newspaper databases starts for some major titles around 1980. Begin with these three news databases on our News Sources Web page: Academic Universe, NewsBank InfoWeb, and Dow Jones Interactive. All these databases are also available through the Library Gateway.
Academic Universe (popularly known as Lexis/Nexis) is an online database originally created for lawyers, businesses, and broadcast and print news organizations. It contains the full text of a number of large- and medium-size newspapers; transcripts of broadcast news shows, interviews, and press conferences; local and state business publications; wire services; some popular magazines; and legal materials. Since it is updated daily, it is an excellent index to recent topics and events.
NewsBank InfoWeb provides comprehensive news coverage of over 500 regional, national, international, and wire services, including papers in many small cities around the country. Some area papers, such as the Ithaca Journal and the Binghamton Press & Sun Bulletin, are covered by this service. However, NewsBank is not a comprehensive index to these papers.
Dow Jones Interactive is an online collection of business magazines and newspapers. The Business Newsstand section provides the full text of stories in the Wall Street Journal (U.S., Europe, and Asia editions), New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times.
Searchable archives of back issues of newspapers are beginning to appear as separate Web sites on the Internet. See Searchable News Archives for links to individual newspaper archives on the Web.
Pre-1980 News Coverage: Historical Newspapers Online, a searchable database of indexing for the New York Times (1851-1923) and the Times of London (1790-1980), has just become available through the Library Gateway. Otherwise, for the years before 1980, use the New York Times Index (1851-), the Washington Post Index (1971-), the Wall Street Journal Index (1955-), and the Christian Science Monitor Index (1949-) in Olin Reference. The Wall Street Journal Index is also available in the Management and ILR libraries from 1958 to date. The Personal Name Index to The New York Times Index is an index to the volumes of the New York Times Index, rather than to the newspaper itself. References are to the date and page of the index volumes. This multi-volume set brings together in a single alphabetic sequence all names that appeared in the index volumes, including names appearing in "Book Reviews," "Concerts," "Deaths," "Disappearances," etc. The Personal Name Index covers the years 1851-1989.
For locating basic facts and background on news events, try Facts on File (1940- ) and Keesing's Record of World Events (1931- ), available in the Olin Library reference collection.
Where Are the Newspapers? Current print issues of newspapers from around the world, including major U.S. titles, are located on the lower level of Olin Library. Newspapers from 20 Asian countries are available in the Severinghaus Asia Reading Room of Kroch Library. Newspapers are available in print form until they are superseded by microfilm. The microfilm is located in the microform stack area, also on the lower level of Olin Library. To determine whether we own the newspaper you want, search the title in the CU Library Catalog. Keep in mind that many current newspapers are available in full text through one of the sources mentioned earlier. If you do not find the title you want, please ask for assistance at the reference desk in Olin Library.
Part II: In an upcoming issue of Cite & Byte, we'll review how to find the news in ethnic, international, and pre-20th-century sources.
Michael Engle, Reference Librarian
moe1@cornell.edu
In November of 1998, the Collection Development Division began to publish a compilation of citations and brief reviews to materials recently added to the Olin stacks. Readers will find this work, Significant New Acquisitions, on the Web and a brief description of its intent and content below.
Significant New Acquisitions is a descendant of the "Bookmark Series," a review and commentary published by the Library for a dozen years in the 60s and 70s. Its name, while hardly elegant, reflects the current state of the art, when the Library acquires digital resources, compact disks and electronic journals in addition to books and journals. Each of the monthly issues highlights a careful selection of titles in the Olin stack collections or in its growing virtual stacks on the Internet. The librarian who made the selection furnishes bibliographic description and classification data and appends a brief annotation that highlights the work's significance. Read issue-by-issue, this work serves as a current awareness device, highlighting paper and digital materials before they join their millions of bibliographic kin. As the compilation grows, it will provide a chronicle of how the library collections grew. But the overall intent of the publication, as of the librarians who compile it, is to provide readers with materials of interest to them.
Examples from the December issue appear below. Each issue begins with a contents section of author and title citations arranged in classification order, i.e. A to Z in the Library of Congress system. Readers may "click" from the contents section to individual entries or scroll through each issue which contains from fifteen to twenty titles.
Freud: conflict and culture, ed. Michael S. Roth. New York: Knopf, 1998.
Location: Olin BF 173 .F896x 1998
Prepared to accompany the Freud exhibit at the Library of Congress, this collection of essays is grouped into four broad parts: "Freud Writing and Working," Interpretation, Suggestion, and Agency," "Absorption and Diffusion," and "Contested Legacies."
(Martha Hsu, mrh2@cornell.edu) (name of reviewer)
David Block, Head, Collection Development
db10@cornell.edu
One of the most heavily used parts of the Uris Library reference collection is the education and careers section, and particularly the publications that rank undergraduate and graduate programs in the U.S. Nearly all the significant rankings publications are now available on the Internet.
The Education and Social Science Library at the University of Illinois maintains the College and University Rankings Web site. Rankings are divided into General/Undergraduate, Graduate, Business School, Law School, and International sections. See also the Caution and Controversy section on this site, which provides a historical overview of rankings and links to a variety of papers and Web sites on pros and cons of ranking education institutions and programs. A useful and up-to-date bibliography of articles about educational rankings is also maintained on the site.
Among the rankings available are: U.S. News and World Report rankings for undergraduate and graduate programs, Princeton Review's Top Colleges, Mother Jones top ten activist schools, Money's Value Rankings, and the National Research Council Research-Doctorate Program Rankings.
Many of these rankings are also available in print in the Uris Library reference collection. For further information, ask at the Olin or Uris reference desks, or send us e-mail.
Michael Engle, Reference Librarian
moe1@cornell.edu
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URL:http://www.library.cornell.edu/okuref/citebyte/cb91.htm Martha Walker, editor, Cite & Byte [rev. 2/5/99] Amy Blumenthal and Mark Siegal, editorial assistants Olin·Kroch·Uris Libraries Reference Services Division |
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