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ECHS 3067: Research Seminar in Economic History II

Prof. Alan Dye, Spring 2023

Free Subscription to the New York Times!

Free Digital Subscription to the New York Times!

Barnard and Columbia University students, faculty, and staff now have full access to NYTimes.com through Columbia University Libraries.

  • Full instructions for signing up are here, including how to cancel an existing paid account should you need to. 
  • Barnard students need to sign up using your Columbia email (it's your UNI@columbia.edu). All students are given a CU email.
  • If you want NYTimes emails and newsletters to forward to your Barnard email be sure to have email forwarding set up.


Times Machine

Popular economics news sources

Wall Street Journal via the newspaper website

  • Columbia University students, faculty, and staff have full access to WSJ.com through Columbia University Libraries
    Sign up for an account on the CUL Registration Page. Be sure to use your @columbia.edu email address. 
  • Faculty and staff need to validate their memberships once a year on our CUL Registration Page. Student accounts should stay active until graduation.
  • For more information, see this guide.
     

Wall Street Journal via Factiva

  • Please be sure to use this link (also available from the CLIO record). It will prompt you for your UNI in order to grant you access to our subscription.
  • Factiva is our best way to see the full text of late breaking news from the Wall Street Journal; content from WSJ.com is uploaded to Factiva throughout the day.
  • Finding specific articles:
    • If you see an article on WSJ.com behind a paywall, use this link to search WSJ in Factiva.
    • Enter the article title in the Free Text Search box to find the full text.
    • Article titles sometimes vary between wsj.com and the newspaper, so you may need to do broader keyword searches when trying to find an article cited on the web site. Here's an example from the University of Chicago’s library Factiva search tips:
      • Web version: Home runs are no longer paying the bills (Link is behind WSJ paywall)
      • Factiva version: Homers No Longer Pay the Bills
  • Browsing:
    • This isn’t super intuitive. Let me know if you have questions! See the screenshot below, too.
    • To see all articles published on a given day:
      • Select “Search” in the top bar to get to a blank Free Text Search box.
      • Make sure the Query Genius Mode is enabled in the top right hand side of the page.
      • Enter wc>1 in the search box. This tells Factiva to give you all articles with word counts greater than one word.
      • Under the search box, select Date - your options include in the last day/week/month/etc. You can also enter a specific date range. 
      • Under Date, select Source. This will give you a search box and let you search for Wall Street Journal. I usually select “The Wall Street Journal - All sources”, but you can also specify just the online version or just the newspaper.

screenshot

Wall Street Journal via ProQuest

  • Please be sure to use this link (also available from the CLIO record ). It will prompt you for your UNI in order to grant you access to our subscription. ProQuest uploads WSJ content only once a day and does not have the current day’s news.
  • However, it’s much easier to browse content if you are interested in seeing a list of articles published on a given day, provided that day is yesterday or earlier.
  • Browsing:
    • Use this link to search WSJ in ProQuest.
    • Navigate down to “Browse specific issues”.
    • Select the day you wish to review.

Financial Times

The Economist via the magazine website

  • Please be sure to use this link (also available from the CLIO record). It will prompt you for your UNI in order to grant you access to our subscription.
  • If you want to search The Economist through a more robust database, you can also access it in ProQuest .

New York Times via the newspaper website

  • Columbia University students, faculty, and staff have full access to NYtimes.com through Columbia University Libraries
    Sign up for an account on the CUL Registration Page. Be sure to use your @columbia.edu email address. 
  • Student accounts expire in December of the anticipated graduation year entered when registering for an account. Access will expire after four years for current faculty and staff and can be renewed. This subscription does not include access to The New York Times Crosswords (Games) or Cooking apps.
  • For more information, see this guide.

Jennie Correia, Social Sciences Librarian

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Jennie Correia
she/her/hers
Contact:
Milstein 304
212.854.9096
Website

Search Techniques for Magazines and Newspapers

This guide lists digitized, full-text searchable databases for newspapers and magazines, with a focus on databases that have historical (e.g. 20th century and earlier) coverage. In order to search in these databases, you should use terms that would have been in wide use at the time of the writing of the article, even if those terms or words would not be in use currently. Build these lists of keywords from your reference sources, secondary sources and from other primary sources. 

We have access to many more newspapers and magazines than are included in the databases listed on this guide. To search for a specific newspaper or magazine, for publications from a certain city, or for a specific article, use CLIO:

  • To search for a newspaper or magazine, search in the Catalog. You can search first in E-Journal Titles to see if we have digital coverage of the journal during the years you are looking for; if not, broaden your search to the Catalog as we may have it in print or on microfilm. Narrow your format to Newspaper or Journal/Periodical to hone in on the correct title and keep in mind that there may be many publications with the same name--look to place of publication or the full catalog description to determine if it is the right one. Click on the catalog record; the box on the right will have information about what years we have and in which format/from which databases.
  • To find newspapers from a certain city, search in the Catalog, narrowing the format to Newspaper first (you can do this with other formats such as Journal/Periodical, but since we have access to so many more scholarly journals than popular magazines, you may not find the type of periodical you're after). Then select Publication Place in the search bar and enter the name of the town or city, adding quotes for place names with more than one word, e.g. "Los Angeles". This is not a fool-proof method, and you may try similar searches in WorldCat to find many more publications.
  • To search for a specific article (for which you have a citation, ideally with the publication and date), try searching first in the Articles tab, making sure to unselect the pre-applied "Not Content Type: Newspaper Article." If the article is not returned, follow the above instructions to search for the name of the newspaper or magazine in the Catalog. If you do not find it, or if we do not have coverage for the date on which the article appeared, you can put in an ILL request for the article. Try to include as much information on the request as you can, and know that this approach will take some time. Another approach is to see if NYPL or NYU has coverage for the newspaper or magazine and go to a branch or to NYU to use it (Barnard and Columbia students have reciprocal on-site access to NYU Libraries).​

Selected Newspaper, Magazine, and Other News Media Databases

Many of the databases noted in the Primary Sources and Articles pages of this guide also contain digitized newspapers and magazines. Those databases are not repeated here--definitely check those lists out if there is a subject area or time period not covered in these databases.