Wisconsin InfoLink is an almanac of Wisconsin facts and resources compiled by Ron Larson. Each week on the WisconsinWatch blog, Larson introduces us to some of these gems.
The past two blog postings of mine dealt with finding Wisconsin newspapers on the Web, first with Newspaper Archive and then with BadgerLink. In the third installment of this series, I’ll introduce you to NewsLibrary.com, a newspaper Web site maintained by NewsBank.
NewsLibrary.com proclaims that it has “more than 182 million newspaper articles from thousands of credible U.S. publications” available in its database. Sixty of those thousands of credible publications are from Wisconsin, mostly newspapers, and there are a few television Web sites.
Wisconsin newspapers that are searchable on NewsLibrary.com include the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Wisconsin State Journal and The Capital Times, and smaller newspapers such as the Superior Telegram, La Crosse Tribune, Beloit Daily News and the Ripon Commonwealth Press. (Here’s the full list.)
Most of the publications go back three to six years, with a few going back to the early 2000s. The one exception is the Wisconsin State Journal/The Capital Times, where you can search for stories going back to March 18, 1989.
The search results preview the first several lines of the story, headline and date free. But you have to pay for a membership or $2.95 per article to see the full text.
On the plus side, NewsLibrary.com is a strong and easy-to-use newspaper database with fast and comprehensive results. On the minus side, especially for those of you who are used to getting information for free on the Web, the cost is a drawback. But if you need a few articles quickly, NewsLibrary.com might be just what you need.
Update on BadgerLink: The Wisconsin Newspapers Digital Research site on BadgerLink, a fledgling newspaper resource I reported on in a recent blog post, has 10 fewer newspapers available in its collection. Gannett, a large newspaper chain with papers in 29 states, requested that its Wisconsin dailies be removed because it already had a contract with another archive company.
These papers are no longer available on the Wisconsin Newspapers Digital Research site:
The Post-Crescent in Appleton
The Reporter in Fond du Lac
Green Bay Press-Gazette
Herald Times Reporter in Manitowoc
Marshfield News-Herald
Oshkosh Northwestern
Sheboygan Press
Stevens Point Journal
Wausau Daily Herald
The Daily Tribune in Wisconsin Rapids
I realize this post is older than dirt, but I am outraged at this decision by Gannett. This was the only source available to research articles in their original format complete with photographs. I had been wanting to retrieve many articles I knew of featuring friends and family and had the link bookmarked for this purpose. Now I have no way of acquiring this, the local libraries definitely don’t have a searchable index nor digital quality material and I am not about to sift through a decade of microfilms. Their agreement with ProQuest appears at most to include full text but no images–and I don’t know how to access ProQuest with those resources since that was removed from Badgerlink. I am highly frustrated by Ganett and feel they continue to dig themselves into the ground with such business decisions (another being to double their print cost and charge even for basic online access).