Learn what your local library has to offer in terms of news

The Truth Matters, Chapter Ten

This is the tenth chapter of my book, The Truth Matters. Chapter one is here, chapter two is here, chapter three is here, chapter four is here, chapter five is here, chapter six is here, chapter seven is here, chapter eight is here, chapter nine is here.

Key points:

· Libraries are even more essential in the internet era; they are the gatekeepers of trustworthy information.

· Virtually all public libraries allow free online access to extremely valuable news and research databases.

· Search engines of major newspapers are invaluable.

Libraries have become somewhat anachronistic in the internet era. Why go there to look up information in dusty books when a simple internet search will tell you whatever you want to know? most people ask today.

While books may not be the essential sources of basic information that they were historically, libraries today are much more than just book collections. Many local libraries now have online databases available free to anyone with a library card number. State libraries may have additional databases available and even top university libraries are often accessible to their alumni.

My personal experience is with the Fairfax County library in Virginia, where I live. If I go to the library home page there is a link to “online resources.” There are a number of databases listed to help people with a variety of things such as personal investments, genealogy and even auto repairs. I will concentrate on those dealing with news.

One of the most powerful is one called Proquest. You click on the icon and are asked for your library card number, which you can probably apply for online if you don’t have one. This will bring you to a typical search engine that will search the thousands of publications it has indexed. Many have full text access, although some academic publications may have what’s called a “moving wall,” meaning that full access may be limited to articles published a year or more ago.

Insofar as news is concerned, I have full access to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. The availability of particular newspapers varies according to your library’s contract with Proquest. But the Times and the Journal are true national newspapers that are very widely available on library websites.

This is important, of course, because both the Times and Journal require subscriptions for full access to their articles, with only a very limited number being available to nonsubscribers, which may also require registering with the paper and getting a username and password. As this is written, a basic online subscription to the Times costs $15 per month or $180 per year; one for the Journal is close to $400 per year after an introductory discount rate.

These rates are obviously well beyond the means of most Americans. Yet on their local library website they may be available for free. Admittedly, Proquest’s online offering is not as easy to read as a traditional newspaper’s print edition or even its web page. But it is there for those looking for something in particular. I often cut-and-paste the headline from the Wall Street Journal, to which I don’t subscribe, into Proquest to call up a free copy of that article.

In one respect Proquest has a search engine superior to the Times’ own search engine for searching its archives. If you have only a vague sense of when some article appeared and have a mass of citations to search, Proquest will give you a graph showing the distribution of when articles began appearing and their frequency distribution. I find this very helpful in sorting search results and honing in on precisely what I am looking for.

Ebsco and Gale are two other databases available on the Fairfax library website that also have access to a number of news publications. They really aren’t set up to allow one to simply scan or browse a particular publication, and full text availability is sometimes very limited. But they have search engines and access to many publications that would never turn up or would be unavailable to read in a general internet search engine such as Google or Yahoo.

For college graduates looking for more advanced library access, check with the school you went to. Many offer alumni some access to the university’s online subscriptions. You will have to register as an alumnus first and be given a university ID or email address that you will use for access.

I went to Georgetown University and have a number of databases available including Proquest. But because the university’s contract with Proquest is different than Fairfax Country’s, there are a number of newspapers and other publications available here that aren’t available on the Fairfax version. Georgetown also allows alumni access to other useful databases such as Congressional Quarterly, which is invaluable for research on laws and public policy, and a number of academic journals that would be prohibitively expensive for an individual to subscribe to through databases such as Project Muse.