Library News
ProQuest: The Online Newspaper Database
Posted on September 24th, 2019
When looking for newspapers in the past and present, Booth Library has numerous resources to search. Whether you are looking for old New York Times articles from the early 20th century, or the Chicago Tribune from yesterday, many of these can be found using the ProQuest search engine. This post will focus on how to navigate ProQuest using the Historical New York Times as an example.
Click to see full image
You can find the Historical New York Times under the “newspaper” link, in the articles tab on the Booth homepage.
Clicking on “New York Times (1851-2007)“, in the drop down menu “Historical Newspapers” goes to the ProQuest webpage. (below)
Click to see full image
ProQuest has a lot of features that can be used to find specific articles or browse entire editions. The advanced search option is for the user to type keywords into and to search the many editions of the New York Times. Other items can be specified, whether it is an article, advertisements, comic, legal notices, etc. Once a keyword is entered into the searchbox, a list of articles and other content from the newspapers is generated.
Click to see full image
The filter can be changed based on what general date you specify. For instance, it could be by decade, month, or even the day of whatever you want to look at. The document type also specifies what type of content there is in the newspapers, like an article, classified ad, front page article, etc. On the right is an example of what the filter looks like when searching.
Once an article is selected, there is a larger page that comes up. The title is displayed as well as the author and when the content was published. Three tabs appear on the page when looking at the content. The first tab shows just the article itself. This can be useful if just the content is important. The second tab has the article within the context of the whole newspaper page. Seeing the whole newspaper page can help to see what other events were going on at the time. The third tab has details regarding the article. There is also an option to browse the whole newspaper issue.
Click to see full image
In the article page, there are options to download the content or even the whole newspaper page as a PDF. This way there is no need for internet access when looking at articles, advertisements, or whatever the newspaper has. There are also options to cite, print, email, and save the content. ProQuest provides many options in looking at not only the New York Times, but many different newspapers that are available online at Booth Library.
