Features
- Kansas News Source
- If patron wants to search for newpapers in small towns and you’re not sure which publications to search for … List of towns and their local newspaper publications
- Use it most for the Kansas news sources – local events, local to Hays or other small towns, our other databases may not get that granular
- Some people use it for genealogical research – obituaries are included in here
- A-Z source list at the top will list coverage for publications (most only go back to the 60s)
Map search
- Used to be the default homepage before redesign
- If you’re looking for a news source from a specific location and not sure what the publication is called or want a list of local newspapers, click through map and narrow down into more local divisions
Searching
- Fields to search by are not super effecting
- Not a lot of the articles in this database have all the metadata for those fields … the more historical you go, the less metadata you get
- Recommend to leave it “select a field (optional) if looking for older materials
- Variety of date formats are accepted (hover over question mark)
- Search by word count
- If you’re searching for something and wanting something more substantive use the word count search (ex. more than 500 words)
- More feature articles, opinion, human interest articles, etc.
- Other library libguides for searching libguides recommend setting the section (op* or edi*) to get opinions or editorials, letters to the editor
- Good for pro/con presentations for COMM 100 students, etc. in addition to our controversial issues databases
- Within the command line/single line search there are some special operators
- Adjacency operator (one word within a few words of another; words have to be in order)
- Ex. “Brittney ADJ2 Squire” (within two words after that) to find Brittney Squire and Brittney Marie Squire
- Near operator (words don’t have to be in order)
- Ex “Olympic NEAR3 athletes”
- See full list of operators scroll to bottom to Need Help … and view help documentation … within “Searching Section” they have important search fundamentals
Filters
- A few notable/different filters include blog and university/college newspapers
- Automatically searches by “newest” at times and sometimes will search by “best match” make sure you pay attention to that area.
Extras
- Quick links on home page
- Hot topics – includes good examples for how to construct those command line searches. The content itself isn’t overly great but the searches and search operators are listed as examples and can be a helpful way to show students what a strong search looks like for some popular topics
- Special reports – similar to reports in CQ Researcher but these are better organized and up to date. Example: Natural disasters
- Background data - wasn’t super helpful
- Images (top nav) - In our subscription, you can’t search for images using the regular searching but you can find images on a certain topic images. Ex an article in newsbank will show the captions, but you don’t see images that go with captions with our subscription.
- Search topics - similar to credo reference to suggest alternate search terms (specific natural disasters, synonyms, related terms)
When you Sign In/Create an Account
- Save to personal folder – if you use another tool like Zotero, to save across databases, may not be as helpful but for projects that are based in newspaper articles, could be helpful
- Save articles
- Save searches
- Saved alert – get an update at a designated frequency
