NEWS ONLINE

CONTENTS:

• NewspaperLinks
• U.S. News Archives on the Web
• Newsblaster: An Automatic Weblogger

NEWSPAPERLINKS

If you haven't tried NewspaperLinks yet, it is time. It's simple, clear, and chock-full of newspaper links and more. Use the drop-down menus at the right to navigate, restrict your query or use the search box. Besides dailies, weeklies, Canadian and international newspapers, find college news, archives, newspaper groups, associations and media organizations.

Limit your searches by selecting a state for the U.S. papers, a province for Canadian ones and a region for international queries. Then you can restrict a search for a newspaper group, association or media organization to a U.S. state. The student papers are organized alphabetically, so the browser's find-function will be a handy tool. Oh, remember to click the search button!

http://www.newspaperlinks.com/home.cfm

U.S. NEWS ARCHIVES ON THE WEB

Remember the archives mentioned above? This is that great resource hot-linked from NewspaperLinks. Volunteers from the Special Libraries Association maintain this fantastic resource. They describe the site best:

These pages provide links to United States news archives available on the Web. Papers are arranged by state. Link to the newspaper home page or the "search archives" page. Use the browser's FIND button to find a paper in this list. We provide the dates of the archive, along with the cost to retrieve the full text of articles. Unless noted, searching is free. Charges may apply to retrieve stories. Archives of non-U.S. newspapers are also available. If the paper you want to search isn't listed, try one of our Other Sources.

A million thanks to the SLA volunteers dedicated to bringing us this treasure trove of news.

http://www.ibiblio.org/slanews/internet/archives.html

NEWSBLASTER: AN AUTOMATIC WEBLOGGER

AI (artificial intelligence) comes to the news. Newsblaster, from the Columbia NLP Group (NLP: natural language processing) offers a service that not only aggregates the news but reads it and writes a summary of what it read. A very cool new tool for the professional researcher.

Newsblaster is a new twist on the intelligent agent. It not only gathers the news from its seventeen sources, but reads it, synthesizes it, cites its sources and sends you its findings in a summary format. If you find an intriguing summary prompting you to delve deeper into a subject, Newsblaster links to its sources right behind each summary. This can be a real time saver for the researcher and it's a time saver that can only evolve.

While it can't read critically for your key words (prospect names, institution name and the like), maybe the next generation will move closer to a personal reader.

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/nlp/newsblaster/

Pamela J. Smith