Library Briefings

What becomes a legend most?

New access to the online edition of The Historical Wall Street Journal

One of the newest and most exciting additions to Northwestern’s growing collection of digital materials is The Historical Wall Street Journal. This electronic facsimile version of America’s foremost source of business information provides searchable full-text images and complete content of the newspaper’s editions from 1889 to 1987. The Library offers The Historical Wall Street Journal in addition to two similar products: The New York Times (editions from 1851 to 2001) and the American Periodical Series (APS) Online (digital images of over 1,100 periodicals published from the 18th to the 20th centuries).

Historical newspapers and periodicals are particularly suited to electronic format. Readers can easily skim whole articles online, or replace cumbersome print indexes with keyword searches. The ease of online searching is quickly evident with a glance at The Wall Street Journal. One simple example is a search for articles about pork written in 1889. A "Basic Search" yields 65 citations, which range from ads to news bulletins. But moving to the "Advanced Search" allows the user to construct a more specific or precise query. By combining the words "pork," "price," and "illinois," and restricting the search to the "citation and article text" field, the search yields 13 hits ranging in date from 1910 to 1987.

The Historical Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and APS are part of a suite of historical databases produced by Proquest Information and Learning, a part of the Proquest Company. Users can search all three databases simultaneously by clicking on the "databases selected" bar at the welcome screen for either The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, then follow the instructions to complete the search.

A word to the wise searcher: search terms are not highlighted in retrieval sets, and, because many of the original texts have small and cramped print, a specific search term may not be immediately apparent. To help master the subtleties of searching ProQuest databases, users are strongly encouraged to read through help screens and instructions. ProQuest offers an extremely useful tips and facts sheet to help searchers get started. This sheet, called “Product Tour: ProQuest Historical Newspapers,” is available online at
http://www.il.proquest.com/proquest/features/feature-04/TourHNP.doc

Access to The Historical Wall Street Journal, as well as to The New York Times and APS, is limited to Northwestern students, faculty, and staff. Each of these resources can be accessed via NUcat, by typing in the resource name, then clicking as appropriate. The Journal may be accessed directly at http://er.library.northwestern.edu/detail.asp?id=310768&pn=1.

-- Harriet Lightman