Week 3 Newspapers and Maine Newstand

Sunday, October 14, 2012

These two resources, from the database supplier Proquest, give you and your patrons access to the full text of more than 500 U.S. and international news sources including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and the Times of London and hundreds of other news sources and news wires.
The Maine Newsstand is a special subset of the larger Proquest database that includes an index and full text coverage of five Maine newspapers:

• Bangor Daily News (12/92-present)
• Kennebec Journal (6/93-present)
• Lewiston Sun Journal (2006-present)
• Portland Press Herald (11/95-present)
• Central Maine Morning Sentinel (8/93-present)

Take a look at the homepage for Maine Newsstand. At the top, under the title, there are several options for looking for information.  Basic search  is the default. There is also advanced search which lets you enter more criteria to focus your research.  You can also search just obituaries or a particular newspaper publication.  Let’s talk about basic search first.

The basic search function works a little bit like Google or Yahoo search. Begin typing your keywords and a menu of choices will pop up.  If one of the options fits what you’re looking for, choose it, otherwise, keep typing and when you finish, hit return.

Before searching, click the box beside “Full text documents only.” Your results will have full text in html, pdf or both. Use the Set Alert feature to have Proquest run searches for you and inform you when something new on your topic has been added. Email the search results or complete articles to yourself or someone else.

Advanced search allows you many more options up front for refining exactly what you’re looking for.  You can search for words in different places in the documents, search date ranges, or for specific companies or people mentioned and several other options.  All these options help you manage the number of articles that you will ultimately have to sort through.

Discovery Exercise

Create a blog posting discussing the following questions and other observations you have about Proquest. All resources can be accessed via this alphabetical list.

1.The first 3 minutes of  the short tutorial “Maine Resources in Marvel” is about the Maine Newsstand.

2. Do a basic search on something of interest to you. Report your findings and observations.

3. Save this search to perform again or create an alert which will let you know when something new is added that fits your search criteria.

4. See what your Invitational cohort is discovering. Choose at least one other Invitational blog, read that person’s post (about this or a previous lesson), and comment on it. You may like to check each others blogs throughout the Invitational as you learn together.

4. This is Maine Library Snapshot Week which makes it the perfect opportunity to report how many patrons/users/members you have helped find the information they need using this or any other MARVEL resource.  Blog about an experience you had showing a patron how to use MARVEL.