General Indexes

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General indexes are interdisciplinary and cover a broad range of topics. Academic libraries select indexes that index periodicals appropriate for academic-level research. These indexes may include some magazines (e.g., Time, Newsweek, etc.) and newspapers but also include many key journals from a wide range of subject areas (e.g., College Literature, Journal of Psychology, etc.).

The Mansfield Library subscribes to over 100 online indexes to periodical literature. Two of the general online indexes are:

• Expanded Academic ASAP
• Newsbank

To connect to these resources, go to the Mansfield Library home page and select the Find Articles link. Note: To access these resources from any off-campus location you must first create a remote access account.

Expanded Academic ASAP indexes more that 1500 magazines and journals and includes the full contents of the articles for about 500 of these titles. It covers the time period of 1980 to the present. The subscription provides Web access and indexing is updated daily.

Newsbank is completely full-text and selectively indexes over 500 U.S. regional and national newspaper, 11 Canadian newspapers and a host of wire services and broadcasts. It covers the time period of 1991 to the present. The subscription provides Web access and indexing is updated daily.

Assignment #2:

1. Open Expanded Academic ASAP. Complete a subject search on Presidential Election 2000. Identify the first full-text article. Beneath the publication information a link will read: View text and full content retrieval choices. Click on this link to see the complete article.
2. To the left of the screen select the e-mail option and mail this article to your own personal e-mail address. You may also print or download the article to a disk as a text file (filename.txt).
3. Open Newsbank. Complete a subject search on Presidential Election 2000. Beneath the search box, click the circle to return "most recent matches first." By reviewing the headlines, you can review the sequence of events in reverse chronological order. Newsbank is completely full text.
4. Select one of the articles and link to the full-text by clicking the underlined headline. Click "Text only display." Save the article to disk: insert a disk into the hard drive; click file and "save as" in the drop-down menu; give the document a filename with a text designation (e.g., filename.txt); then save.
5. Record the citations for each article you selected in full text and send these citations to your instructor. Identify which one was selected from Expanded Academic ASAP and which one was selected from Newsbank.