23.14 Old-school Mashup You Can’t Beat: Google News

Mashups are not that new (Shakespeare’s tragedies are mashups of historical sources, perhaps), and even on the web some have been around for awhile. I really can’t live long without Google News, which mashes together content from newspaper/news websites into a straightforward, easy to grab list of headlines. It doesn’t replace the newspaper itself (too many good or important stories don’t appear unless you search for them), but for a quick check of the headlines? A look at the zeitgeist? What’s hot in technology and new in science? Google News can’t be beat. Check out the other nation’s Google News pages at the bottom of the US page … interesting to see how Canada, Australia, and the UK look at US stuff. Also check out the News Archive Search near the top of the Google News US page. But before you pay for an old newspaper article…

23.15 Mashup or Archive? Historical Newspapers from ProQuest

Google News Archive is a great tool, but it will push you to pay-to-view articles. LCPL has a subscription to ProQuest Historical Newspapers, which has full-text and image historical newspapers for free. New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor and Los Angeles Times. So before you follow a Google News Archive link to a pay for an article from one of those newspapers, try your search in Historical Newspapers. It’s amazing how much can be found in a more than a century worth of daily papers. But I hear you cry… what’s Web 2.0 about a Proquest database?