What Do You Mean I Can’t Download the Full Text? - Supporting Research on Licensed Text Mining Platforms

As archives and digitized materials such as historical newspapers and journals become increasingly accessible, the demand for access to and effective analysis of these materials continues to rise. Gale, ProQuest, NewsBank, JSTOR and more have developed products providing restricted access to their full text archives, appeasing the original publishers but coming at a steep cost to academic institutions seeking to provide access to their researchers. In this presentation, we discuss our experiences working with a number of these platforms and speaking with the platforms’ developers about their implementation and features. Further, we detail our experiences actively supporting a number of research projects utilizing these data. Particularly we focus on navigating the tensions created in helping researchers in this space, both in time allotment and in managing expectations in the face of the “garbage in-garbage out” principle and the difficulty in effectively communicating the absence of a magic “easy” button to make sense of millions of newspaper articles over time.