An enormous amount of news and opinion pours out of newspapers, blogs, newswires, journals, broadcast transcripts, and videos from around the world every day, from the most information-packed and insightful articles to the most irrational and irate letters to the editor. To help students and faculty sort out the cacophony, the Library subscribes to Access World News from Newsbank—a database providing access to stories from 160 countries and more than 9,000 online and print news sources, covering politics, health, sports, culture, and other topics frequently requested by researchers.
Open the Access World News database and you’re presented with a map of the world in nine regions—the continents plus the Caribbean, Central America, and the Middle East. An accompanying list shows the number of sources that NewsBank offers from each region. Click a region to divide it into countries; click countries to divide them into states and provinces; and click a state or province to bring up a list of publications in the area. You can refine your search to include Source Type, Publication, City, Year, Month, Day, or even Era—NewsBank offers news items of historical interest that extend back through Presidential Eras to Theodore Roosevelt. No matter how narrowly you confine your search, you can retrace your steps by cancelling categories in your search history.
If you would like to browse European newspapers for election day views of the United States presidential race, you can click Europe, the Year 2016, the month November 2016, the day November 8, Source Type “Newspaper”, and sort by “Best matches first.” Search the term “US election” and you get 403 results, at the top an analysis in Edinburgh’s The Scotsman, “Why US elections are nastier than British ones.”
Need help deciding on a topic? Click the “Find a topic” panel, which is divided conveniently into broad categories: Business & Economic, Criminal Justice, Education, Environmental Studies, Health, International Studies, Performing & Fine Arts, Political Science, Religion, Science, Social Issues, and Technology. Clicking a category in the panel gives you a list of more specific categories. From the list covered by Social Issues, for instance, clicking the subcategory “Racial Profiling” gives 5,797 results; you may limit results further by selecting a preferred Source Type.
You can also set up email alerts to watch for new results that match your topic. Simply click on “Create Email Alert” just below the Search button, select how often you want to be alerted, and enter email addresses in the box. Manage alerts by clicking “My Collection” on the menu bar at the top, and then the “Saved Alerts” link.