Proquest's Boston (Daily) Globe -- or not

Joel S. Berson Berson at ATT.NET
Fri Jul 23 14:33:37 UTC 2010


At 7/22/2010 10:31 PM, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 9:45 PM, Jonathan Lighter
><wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Excellent work, Joel. After Garson alerted me to the ref., I
> still failed to
> > find the quote in ProQuest. Then I ran a test with "Pacific" and "May 1 -
> > September 1, 1945," and learned that the word had never appeared in the BG
> > between those dates.  "Marines" and "Japanese" gave similar results.
> >
> > Thus there is at least one huge gap in ProQuest's BG collection.
> > Yet another pitfall of electronic research.
>
>The version of Proquest I'm accessing claims to have The Boston Globe
>from 1872 to 1979, but browsing the issues reveals a gap between 1928
>and 1958.

Puzzling, since the microfilm I looked at is credited to the
publisher O. Proquest of Wooster.  [Partly joshing -- I suspect the
Harvard catalog's citation of "Microfilm. Wooster, O. Proquest,
microfilm reels ; 35 mm." means Wooster, Ohio.  (Although today
Proquest seems to be in Ann Arbor.)  But who abbreviates "Ohio" as
O."?  And the punctuation -- no colon after "O." -- is non-standard.]

The gap of 1928--1958 does not correlate with the dates of the Boston
*Daily* Globe, which Harvard says was the name 1872--1960.

Joel

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