Gale's Infotrac Custom Newspapers database, available through Sailor, makes available to your patrons full-text transcriptions of several medium circulation dailies, which mix marginally adequate national coverage with excellent regional coverage, such as the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, the Star Tribune (Minneapolis), the San Francisco Chronicle, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Detroit Free Press. The database does not include full access (though a few columns are available) to any of the large-circulation national newspapers -- USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal -- but is a valuable supplement to a national newspaper database (eg. ProQuest “National Newspapers”). Archival coverage extends back as far as 1980 for some of the database newspapers.
Conservative news consumers will welcome access to the Washington Times and the New York Post while liberals will enjoy the availability of the Independent (London) and the Guardian (London). English-language and Spanish-language newspapers are available from 11 countries, and the database is especially strong in its collection of papers from the United Kingdom. “Custom Newspapers” also includes a wealth of local papers from the United States. Papers local to Maryland are the Capital (Annapolis, 2/1/2009-current) and the Frederick News-Post (12/31/2004-current).
Users may search across publications as well as within publications. Publications can be browsed alphabetically, by country of publication, by language, by target audience (general or trade), or by publication subject (e.g. law). Browsing within countries by state or city of publication would be a useful feature if it were provided but, unfortunately, it is not. Database users may set up RSS feeds on news topics with articles delivered either to their email accounts or appearing on their individually configured homepages.
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