Have fun!

Many newspaper websites these days offer search access to their archives and so it’s a fairly simple process to go to a specific newspaper website and look for their archive database. If archives are available usually there is a prominent link somewhere on the newspaper’s homepage. There is a catch, however. Many, though not all, newspapers have established fee based subscription requirements for access to their valuable historical article archives. They may let you search the archive for free, but often payment of a fee is required to retrieve the full text of the article to your computer.

Fortunately for students and faculty, the USCA Library offers free access to the full text articles from some of the best newpapers in the US through subscription to the ProQuest Historical Newspapers archive. Newspapers included in this service are:

• The Christian Science Monitor 1908 – 1993
• The New York Times 1851 – 2003
• The Wall Street Journal 1889 – 1989
• The Washington Post 1877 – 1990

The service pemits searching of any one or combination or all of these newspapers at one time. Note that ProQuest also provides full text access to the current article databases for these newspapers and the Los Angeles Times. ProQuest does not permit searching of their historical and current databases at the same time.

The giant search engine Google recently introduced its own historical newpaper archive section. You can visit the Google News Archive Search at http://news.google.com/archivesearch.

A big advantage of the Google service is that it includes many, many more newspapers than ProQuest. Some of the hits you’ll find in Google’s service will feature access to free articles, however, as expected most articles in digital newspaper archives involve a fee to access the full text. Search hits found in searches of Google’s database include helpful extra features, such as links to recommended Web sites.

Should you just use one or the other of these great tools? Heck no; both are powerful research tools which should be consulted whenever you’ve got a research project concerning American history.

For full text access to current national and international newspapers, students and faculty at USCA should of course also consult the Lexis Nexis search engine. You can access the ProQuest and Lexis Nexis search engines by using the Database and E-Resources Index on the USCA Library homepage.

Aficionados of American Heritage ( “everything a magazine of popular history should be.” according to Pulitzer Prize winning historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.) would do well to consult the full May 17, 2007, New York Times article by Charles McGrath, “Magazine Suspends Its Run in History.” It is as much an overview of this history magazine as a whimsical profile of current editor Richard F. Snow.

The New York Times is available in full text through the USC Aiken Library databases, or you may consult your librarian.

Posted by Tom Hobbs, Reference Librarian, USC Aiken Library

Tonight the PBS Frontline series will present a program titled Spying on the Home Front that examines the changes in government surveillance of American citizens since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The program highlights a number of cases where citizen right to privacy and other constitutional protections are being eroded. The combination of new laws enacted in the wake of 9/11 and powerful information technologies have substantially increased the government’s surveillance capabilities. The confiscation of book store and library circulation records and warrantless electronic phone tapping are just some of the activities that are undertaken in the effort to protect our security.

For more about tonight’s program which airs locally at 9 pm on channel 13 SCETV and to watch a program preview, visit this site.

If you can’t catch tonight’s program don’t worry. Frontline does an excellent job of archiving their programs. You should be able to watch it from their website soon.

Unfortunately, this fledgling industry in the United States may soon be killed in the crib. The death sentence is scheduled for 15 July 2007. That’s the date set by the US Copyright Review Board to increase copyright royalty fees paid by these internet radio stations to prohibitively high levels. Curiously, the rate increases are much higher for the smaller independent sites. This new regulation will essentially force most broadcasters in the United States to shut down their operations.

The good news is that bills have been introduced in both the US House and Senate to overturn the CRB ruling. Just yesterday in fact the Wyden-Brownback Internet Radio Equality Act was introduced in the Senate. A large coalition of organizations is fighting to overturn the ruling. Find out more by visiting http://www.savenetradio.org. However, the very powerful RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is working hard to keep the CRB ruling.

If you support or are opposed to the legislation to overturn the CRB ruling, get involved by contacting your members of Congress. For info on how to contact your members of Congress, visit http://tinyurl.com/yr9jaq.

Dear students and other scholars,

Are you still using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser? Well, here’s yet another great reason for you to switch to Firefox, the award winning, free, open source web browser. Firefox is available for download here. Firefox offers hundreds of add-on programs that extend the functionality of the web browser. One of the best of these is a reference management program called Zotero. With Zotero, you’ll probably never again need to endure the tedium of referring to tools like the APA, Chicago/Turabian, and MLA style manuals for your term paper projects.

Installation of Zotero into Firefox is quick and simple. The site to download and install Zotero is here.

Zotero lets you build personal reference libraries for your various research projects from online catalogs, online periodical databases, commercial booksellers like Amazon.Com and Borders.Com, and regular web pages. It “senses” what type of research resource you are using (e.g. a book, article, newspaper, government document, video, blog entry, etc.) and upon your instruction it gathers all the bibliographic information and formats it according to your style manual preference. If you wish, you may add notes to build an annotated bibliography. Bibliographies can easily be exported to your favorite word processor, html, and other formats.

Zotero (http://www.zotero.org) is produced by the Center for History and New Media at George Washington University. Zotero was designed to combine the functions of traditional reference management software like Endnotes (a $299 commercial product) with the new technologies of the Web. Zotero is only available for FireFox 2 and greater. So if you use Internet Explorer, you are out of luck.

View a demonstation of Zotero here.

Compare Zotero’s features with other commercial and open source reference management software programs here.

Posted by Paul Lewis, Government Documents Librarian, USC Aiken Library paull@usca.edu

In a February 15 letter to readers, AJC publisher John Mellott announced the pullback of the paper’s distribution area to 73 counties, mostly in Georgia, centered around the metro Atlanta area. The AJC daily print edition will no longer be available in such Georgia cities as Augusta, Columbus, and Savannah, and it will be completely withdrawn from the states of Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina. Readers in those respective markets must place mail subscriptions in order to read the print edition, or perhaps visit a local library which maintains a subscription.

(Your USCA Library offers the Sunday edition in hard copy.)

What once was the major regional newspaper covering the Southeastern United States – - its longtime motto being “we cover Dixie like the dew” – - thus becomes a much more local enterprise.

Along with the distribution cutback, the publisher also announced workforce reductions, a realignment of printing facilities, and a major refocusing toward the AJC’s digital edition.

What is going on with the printed newspaper business? Even the publisher of the New York Times recently stated, “I don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years.” Readership is dropping, as is advertising revenue. Critically important classified ad income is especially down, as the classifieds transition to the internet. The drop off has been cushioned to a degree by an uptick in readership of online newspaper editions. The Newspaper Association of America reports that online newspaper visits jumped by nearly one third between 2005 and 2006. But the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in 2006 estimated that only 14% of newspaper readers ever view an online version. And overall daily newspaper readership has dropped during the last decade, according to Pew, from 50%of the public reading a print newspaper, to 43% today for both print and online readers combined.

And where else does the public go for its news and information needs? The aforementioned Pew Study reports that 54% watch local TV news (down from 77% in 1993), 34% watch cable TV news(about the same as the earliest figure available, 33% in 2002), and 28% view nightly network news (way down from 60% in 1993.) Radio news listenership dropped to 40% in 2006 (down from 47% in1994), and online news visits rose to 31% from 2% in 1995. Sad to say, but according to Pew, 19%of Americans in 2006 received no daily news from any source at all, and that is up from 10% in 1994.

And so, we bid farewell to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as it makes its retreat from the outlying territories. The AJC’s long 138-year history and 9 Pulitzer prizes attest to its significant role in the story of Southern print journalism. However, there has never been a guarantee that newsprint will remain the chosen format. Friend, when was the last time you stopped at the local newsstand for your daily clay tablet, papyrus scroll, or parchment page?

The Pew Research Center for the People and Press released its biennial news consumption research study in 2006. It can be found online at:

             http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=282

Posted by Tom Hobbs, Reference Librarian, USC Aiken Library TomHo@usca.edu