Los Angeles Times Joins Proquest Historical Newspapers (Elliot Kanter, UCSD)

On June 28, 2003, Proquest released the first segment of the Historical Los Angeles Times, 1881-1923.  Because of unexpected production difficulties with the layout and design of the early newspapers, about 30 percent (between 1904 and 1914) was left out initially; this was filled in by the end of July.

The remaining Historical segment, 1924 through 1984, will be added steadily during 2003 and 2004.  This process is ongoing; as of early August about 6 months of 1924 were already online.  The plan is to move forward in time until the Historical newspaper meets the “Current” file of the L.A. Times: 1985-present.

The schedule is as follows:

• 1924 through the mid 1940s by the end of 2003
• complete through 1984 by the end of 2004

When the Los Angeles Times digitization has been completed, the UC libraries will have access to the content of three Proquest newspapers, with the historical files complemented by the current.

Although there appears to be overlap, remember that there are a number of differences between the historical and current segments for each newspaper.

• The historical and current newspapers are on different platforms and cannot be searched together.
• The historical newspapers display article and full page images; the current newspapers display only text
• The historical newspapers include cover-to-cover content; the current newspapers exclude the text of a variety of copyrighted and syndicated articles, as well as advertising and graphics

One more caution–later decades of the historical newspapers also include material under copyright.  In such cases, individual articles, photographs or other works may not be displayed separately.  But they will still be viewable as part of the full page image, which will always be displayed.  It is then possible to mark the article with the Acrobat graphics selection tool, and printed separately.

Proquest has developed a very useful 7-page guide to searching, viewing and printing results from all three Historical Newspapers, available at
http://proquest.umi.com/i-std/en/help/qkguide/historicalnewspapers.pdf

Proquest Next Interface

The just-released Proquest Next interface (being used by the current and historical newspapers, as well as ABI/INFORM and American Periodicals Series Online) includes a number of improvements especially helpful for newspapers, including simplified date searching/limiting, easier selection of article types, and the option to sort by chronological or reverse chronological order, especially useful for a newspaper.  Searchers can even change the language used in the interface and the help screens: French, German, Spanish; Chinese, Japanese and Korean (sorry, no translations of the actual text!).  Watch future issues of CDLINFO for more information on the new Proquest interface.