Globe no longer in Lexis-Nexis

The Boston Globe had dropped out of LexisNexis. It no longer appears in the source list (under Boston or The--a common glitch).

Steve has suggested Factiva as an alternate source, and indeed it is there:

Most Recent Issue: 26 January 2010 First Issue: 1 January 1987 Weekend Update Schedule: The weekend editions are loaded on Factiva during a 1-3 day period after date of publication. Coverage History: Selected coverage from 1 January 1987 to 29 August 2001

Boston.com has recent material at no cost, and can serve as a handy index of "pay-per-view" articles which might be otherwise retrieved for free in Factiva.


The Boston Herald is in LexisNexis.

Blocked Content in Factiva

This week, we discovered that certain news titles in Factiva are unavailable to us due to the terms of our subscription. From the "source info" page, it's impossible to tell that access is blocked, so you might start searching -- as JC and I did earlier this week -- and come up empty. This handy list will help you identify those titles. Many we have alternate access to; others will need to be retrieved via ILL. The list, of course, is static and our world is dynamic, so its accuracy may weaken over time.

SFX (Citation Linker) glitch

This week and last, several of us have noticed that Citation Linker searching isn't always turning up a truly complete list of online access options for serials.

Yesterday,  Vida encountered this problem with the Philadelphia Inquirer:  Citation Linker didn't identify the availability of full-text via Factiva, so it looked as though the  online version ended at 1922. 

Days before, a student looking for the LA Times for the late 1980s and 1990s couldn't imagine (in this instance, wisely) that we'd be missing 20 some odd years and wrote me an email .  Citation Linker listed only LexisNexis holdings (6 mos.), ProQuest Historical Newspapers (to 1985) and a HOLLIS link.  Factiva -- absent from this SFX results list -- had the time period the student needed to search. 

I notified OIS of the problem via the Comments line and was told that after a recent update, the SFX software was not parsing Factiva links properly.   The good news is that they're aware of the problem and addressing it; I don't know how soon the fix will happen, however.  As of this writing, the Citation Linker list for the LA Times  is still incorrect.

Until the problem is resolved -- or  just whenever you have the feeling that your Citation Linker  results are not quite right, Factiva is another place for you to try.

Finding Letters to the Editor in Factiva

Last week, a patron was interested in using Factiva to track down letters to the editor about immigration reform issues. The procedure is a bit quirky, so I pass on steps to you.

To set this limit, you should:

1. enter your search term(s).

2. Click on the Subject category.

3. Click on the subcategory Content Types.

4. Click on the up arrow next to "Letters" to add the code to your search. Just be sure you have inserted an "and" as well; without a Boolean operator, the query can't be processed logically.

Then, before you run the search:

5. Scroll down the page. By default, Factiva is set to "Exclude" three categories of information: republished news;recurring pricing and market data; and obituaries, sports, calendars. Uncheck the boxes. Unless you do so, you will get a "no results" message.