TCA Letters to the Editor
Press Release
Title: Comments on review of ProQuest Historical Newspapers
Date: May 2004
Organization: ProQuest Information and Learning
Letter:
To the Editor of the Charleston Advisor:
On behalf of ProQuest, please accept our appreciation for Tom Gilson's thorough review of ProQuest Historical Newspapers in the January 2004 edition. Thanks for your many positive comments about this exciting new database. May we clarify a few of the issues Mr. Gilson examined?
- Historical Newspapers pricing is based on FTE (Academic Library) or Population Served (Public Library) to make it affordable for all libraries regardless of size. Perpetual Access Licenses and subscription options are available to smaller institutions for a fraction of the prices cited in the review.
- A "Full Page Image" content view is available in addition to the article image content view and the page map navigation feature Mr. Gilson outlines. This option delivers the entire page image via Acrobat Reader so that users can view, print, email, zoom, and save the content on any page just as they can from the individual article image view.
- Historical Newspapers fully complies with the recent court ruling on freelance content. If a publisher does not have rights to deliver a freelancer's work, the article image is blocked from view. However, the blocked articles may be seen in the Full Page Image view and in the page map, contrary to the review. If the publisher later secures distribution rights to the articles, ProQuest can restore the article image view.
- Both article and page image views can be printed using Acrobat Reader printing tools. In addition, Historical Newspapers will soon offer a new Print button option that will automatically size long articles into readable segments that can be seamlessly printed on 8 1/2 x 11 pages. This new feature will make printing large articles effortless.
- We are always on the hunt for manufacturing errors. A massive number of articles is being digitized -- 24 million in The New York Times database alone. Because we've established rigorous quality assurance measures, we find and fix the errors. Mr. Gilson's example from the February 28, 1937 issue of The New York Times is just such an example. These errors are extremely rare.
- Historical Newspapers is a full-text database. It has no indexing or subject categorization, so a nested search will not yield results like those from an indexed database. The relevancy search option will help identify the most pertinent content; however, the database is searching only for the users' keywords. As Mr. Gilson noted, Boolean operators may be used. Searching in Historical Newspapers can also be enhanced using wild card, truncation, and other common tools.
- We chose Acrobat Reader as the browsing tool for the Article Images and the Full Page Images (the page map is a thumbnail JPEG) in response to our customers' strong preference. The images are TIFF images, not true PDF, so the Find button on the Acrobat Reader does not function. Users search the ASCII to find the pertinent articles and full page images they're seeking.
- Currently, the Perpetual Access License for The New York Times allows a library to purchase the years 1851-1924 while subscribing to the 1925-2001 portion. The Perpetual Access License content does not extend to 2001 as implied in the review.
We are committed to providing easy access to the rich content in ProQuest Historical Newspapers. We welcome feedback and analysis. They're an important part of our development process. We thank you again for the favorable review and encourage readers to address any questions directly to us.
Sincerely,
Chris Cowan
Vice President, Publishing
ProQuest Information and Learning
