Newspapers

Coming Soon to OverDrive

We’ve got a holiday treat in store for our patrons!  Before the end of the year, they will be able to discover, browse, and checkout magazines and even some newspapers through OverDrive and the new Library Catalog.  Here are a few of the new titles we’ll be offering:

To read borrowed periodicals, patrons will either need the free NOOK app installed on a compatible device (Android phone/tablet, Apple iPhone/iPad/iPod touch, Windows 8 computer/tablet), or a compatible NOOK tablet.  As with the Zinio and Freegal apps, downloading to a Kindle Fire is possible, but not as straightforward as other devices.  Those apps are not available through the Amazon App store.  But don’t worry, we’re working on instructions to help you walk patrons with those devices through the process.

Here’s what else you need to know about OverDrive Periodicals:

  • Only the current issue is available to download.  This differs from Zinio, in which back issues are available.  However, like Zinio, once an issue is downloaded patrons can keep it for as long as they like.
  • Patrons can check out as many magazines as they would like. There are no loan limits for this format and they do not count against a patron’s checkout limit for other formats available in OverDrive.
  • Some titles have a circulation cap for each issue.  If an issue reaches its circulation cap there will be a message indicating it is no longer available.  We do not anticipate that this will pose a problem in most cases, but please email Sarah Beasley if patrons ask or comment about current issues no longer being available.
  • The OverDrive help pages offer additional information about using OverDrive periodicals.  There’s a helpful introductory video and  step-by-step instructions for downloading and using the Nook app.

We are also continuing our subscription to Zinio.  However, there will be some changes in the titles that are available.  We’ve added some great new content, including some titles especially for children (with two in Spanish!):

Some titles have been pulled from Zinio for Libraries by the publishers,  we have canceled some subscriptions that were not popular, and we are shifting some titles from Zinio to OverDrive.  In addition, the most popular titles will be found in both OverDrive and Zinio.  For a complete list of 2016 titles in Zinio and OverDrive, including information about canceled titles and titles that are exclusive in each, visit our Digital Magazine Title List 2016.

Happy Reading!

Charmaine (CLP)

Continue ReadingComing Soon to OverDrive

Using Google News Archive to Search Local Papers

Google announced a couple years ago that it will no longer add to their News Archive. But the content that is still there may prove useful to doing local history research.

A couple of drawbacks of Google News Archive: currently they have disabled the ability to do an advanced search and limit to a specific publication and date range.  This problem is, hopefully, just a temporary one.  According to this: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/news/Gl23RwnTIlg they are working on updating the search functionality. Secondly, the archive is not complete.  The Pittsburgh Press has an impressive 28,963 issues.  But you will find that certain days are missing.

In my research example I was going to do a search for something about Andrew Carnegie, but decided that example is overused.  So instead, in anticipation of baseball season, I decided I wanted to find the Pittsburgh Press article from the day the Pirates won the World Series in 1925.  This example wouldn’t work if we were searching for the franchise’s first World Series victory because all of October 1909 is missing.

You can access the Pittsburgh Press at: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=djft3U1LymYC or through the links on: http://articles.einetwork.net/.

browse

The browse mode (which is currently the only easy way to find things) give you easily scrollable thumbnails and date organization.  It starts out on the decade level and you can drill down from there into year, month, day.

If you only know the approximate day, the thumbnail view is high enough definition to allow you to read the headlines on the front page of every issue.  In this example, I just knew that the article would be sometime in October.  So I went to the October issues and browsed to find headlines about the Pirate and

the World Series.  Surprisingly, it was easy to find an article on the day before the game but not as easy to locate the article the day after they won.

1925trib

On October 16th 1925 this was the headline on the front page of the Press.  They got bumped from the top spot on the page to a lower tier article!

 

 

 

Yinzers would be outraged if this happened in 2014.  Just compare the headline size to the one in the Trib from last fall.

 

 

Once I found the article I wanted it was easy to zoom into the text and move around the page to read the paper.  Once you find what you want Google allows you to create direct links to the articles.  The only difficult thing is exporting an image or article.  The easiest way I have found to do this is to use the “print screen” function and copy the image into Paint or Word.  From there you can crop to just the information you would like to save or print.

Hopefully the search functionality will be turned back on soon, this will allow users to easily search the OCR output of a specific publication in a defined date range.

Dustin Shilling, Sewickley Public Library

Continue ReadingUsing Google News Archive to Search Local Papers