Online News Pathfinder
Scope:
This pathfinder provides a guide to help navigate TexShare resources related to current events. It also attempts to answer some common questions about where to find information for research projects.
Three TexShare resources for online news:
Regional Business News (EBSCO)
Contains 75 regional business journals, providing state and county-wide information on local businesses across the United States. It is updated on a daily basis and includes full-text articles.
InfoTrac Custom Newspapers
Includes over 140 newspapers and it is international in scope. This database is updated daily, and contains over 28 million articles.
Newspaper Source
Provides access to both national and international newspapers, and contains abstracts and indexing from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, and USA Today.
Where can I find information on businesses in my region?
Regional Business News is a great resource for finding news on local businesses. To look through this database you can either do a keyword search or you can browse through the list of publications available through the database by clicking on the "publications" button. You can restrict your keyword search by publication date and you can limit your results to articles with linked full text.
Where can I get the most comprehensive information on current events across the globe?
InfoTrac Custom Newspapers is a great resource for finding information on current events and you can limit your search by date of publication to gear your search towards more recent resources.
I need information from over 10 years ago: where should I look for this information?
InfoTrac has newspapers from as far back as 1985 and you can limit your search to the exact date range that you are interested in.
Is there a database that can be easily used by younger students?
Student Resource Center GOLD has a very intuitive and fun interface that is tailored towards younger students. To search for online news students can perform a keyword search and then click on the tab for either newspapers or magazines & journals.
I have a very specific research topic and need to narrow down my search by both time and subject area: is this possible?
Absolutely. InfoTrac Newspapers allows you to limit your search to the exact dates and to the newspaper section (regional news, sport, arts & entertainment?) that you are interested in. Regional Business News allows you to limit your search by year and month and by document type.
Here are some sample searches using TexShare resources:
Search #1:
I need to find some newspaper articles on Martin Luther King Jr. for my short research paper for my middle school social studies class. Where can I find articles for this?Student Resource Center Gold would be an excellent starting point for this research.
You can do a search for Martin Luther King Jr. by entering his name directly in the search field.
Your search results will be organized by document type. For newspaper articles related to Martin Luther King Jr. simply click on the "newspapers" tab.
Search #2:
I am writing a paper on current public opinion concerning space research, specifically research by NASA on Mars, for my Communications 101 class. Where can I start finding information on this topic?InfoTrac would be a great resource for this paper because you can limit your search by newspaper section and date.
To conduct this search, you can limit your search to the "Opinion and Editorial" section, and restrict your dates for articles from 2004 up to the present.
Additional Internet Resources
For a list of online newspapers around the world, the Internet Public Library has a good site:
http://www.ipl.org/div/news/
To find a newspaper for a specific geographic location you can use NewsLink:
http://newslink.org/
For a quick overview of the latest news, Google News is useful:
http://news.google.com//
To connect to news feeds and also explore some more informal perspectives on the news, Bloglines can help you search, subscribe to, and share newsfeeds, blogs and rich web content:
http://www.bloglines.com/
For an interesting site exploring the history of news, take a look at the Newseum:
http://www.newseum.org/
This page was written by Amelia Brunskill in Spring 2006.
INF 382S: Library Instruction and Information Literacy, taught by Dr. Loriene Roy
School of Information,
The University of Texas at Austin