Resources for Newspaper Assignment -- Dr. Karen Dalke
The purpose of this guide is familiarize you with newspaper sources provided by the Library and on the public Internet.
If you have any questions about using Library resources for this, or any other assignment connect to the Research Assistance page at http://www.uwgb.edu/Library/research/assistance.html to find out how to contact a reference librarian.
Newspaper Resources from the Cofrin Library
The Library subscribes to a very powerful newspaper databases and it is recommended that you begin your search here. As you are aware, most newspapers have websites, but for the most part only the past week of so of content is available for free. The Library newspaper databases go back for the most part to the late 1980's.
Start with Proquest Newspapers. Below are a few tips for getting good results.
- Say you are interested in serial killers. A search in basic mode in ProQuest newspapers brings up over 37,000 results. A good way to narrow the number and increase the relevancy / amount of content is to select "More search Options" and add a document type limit. If we add the "Feature" document type our results are narrowed to around 500. If we enter "New York Times" in the publication title field are results are down to 22.
- Another way to limit the number of results and increase the relevancy is to search in the title of the article. Select the "Advanced" tab near the top and switch from "Citation and abstract" to "Document title." A search for serial killers in the article title in all publications brings back over 8000. The same search with "Washington Post" as publication title returns 74.
Searching the Public Internet for Newspaper Articles
As noted above only the last week or so is available for free on most newspaper websites. If you are going to search the public web you will want to start with Google News. Be sure to use the advanced search features here to decrease the number of results returned and increase the relevancy.