Resource Update

a. America’s Newspapers Features a New Interface and New Search

By Kay Collins (Resource Liaison), UC Irvine

America’s Newspapers from Newsbank recently launched a new interface.  With the new interface, selecting which papers to search is the first decision.  You can select papers from the new menu in the left tool bar, by clicking on the map, or by selecting by region of the country.

The new left-hand window allows you to choose local papers, California papers, national papers, United States papers, or create a custom list.  The local papers will vary from campus to campus.  If you would like to change the set of papers displayed for your campus, contact me (Kay Collins) at kcollins@lib.uci.edu and I will work with Newsbank to change them.

At the top of the main page is a link to a list of all papers represented.  Newsbank has been adding titles, mostly to smaller local papers.  They will accept suggestions for new titles but we will need to make certain this does not change our negotiated price if they are added to our current list.

Other changes include improvements to the search boxes.  With advanced search, more search fields are supplied than in the past.  A new browse feature has been added to search a specific newspaper title.  It appears once a single newspaper is selected. Once an article is displayed, then links to related topics appear. Toward the bottom, index terms are provided to help with other searches if the links are not useful.
An article bookmark (open URL compliant) is also supplied on the displayed article.  This feature allows you to link directly to the article if cited within a paper.  These citations will probably also start showing up with Google and Yahoo searches.

Newsbank has also added links to some of their other resources to which you subscribe as a library, e.g., the U.S. Congressional Serial Digital Edition.  Like LexisNexis products, it helps transition from one database to the other within the company family of titles to which a library subscribes.

If you have suggestions for changes to the new interface, email me at kcollins@lib.uci.edu.  Newsbank seems open to useful ideas, and they already have plans for more improvements.