By Linda Hauck

Current news databases are used by researchers across disciplines to stay current with developments, construct meaning out of evolving events, and analyze content for political, social, cultural, and public health trends.

Having access to a wide range of local, regional, national, and international sources is key.  Falvey Library has significantly improved access to news by subscribing to Factiva, which adds over 6000 unique, full text titles to our collection, including The Washington Post, Boston Globe, Atlanta Journal Constitution, and Chicago Daily Herald. Transcripts of National Public Radio’s Code Switch and Fox News’ Hannity are searchable. Many foreign language publications are included as well.

The range of trade news is impressive, from Backpacker to Diabetes Week and Global Warming Focus to Oil Market Intelligence. Factiva is a Dow Jones product so the news coverage and indexing is particularly good for financial, economic, and business topics.

The search interface is flexible.  The “Free Text” search box can be used to replicate a search similar to Google; the “Search Form” provides prompts for more focused queries; and examples of advanced search commands facilitate precision searching.  When using either the “Free Text” or “Search Form” handy options for filtering results by subject, industry, region are available. Factiva’s default is to limit searches to the most recent 3 months, so researchers with a deeper time line will need to modify the date range.

Factiva’s Company/Markets tab is an added bonus. Company profiles describe the business segments, corporate family, financial results, and peers, but their real advantage is the depth and breath of company news provided.  The industry snapshots are less robust, but do rank key competitors, facilitate a deep dive into the news, and offer recent analyst reports.

Factiva compliments our other news aggregators, Access World News, Nexis Uni, and ABI Inform, and our direct subscriptions to top news such as The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Financial Times.

For a full list of news sources including archives see Databases A-Z filtered by newspapers.

Linda Hauck, MLS, MBA, is Business Librarian at Falvey Memorial Library.