Online Text News

[George Thompson]

I think it is very useful to test a database by its ability to
retrieve known items, in addition to noting the number of false
retrievals.

I have been using the EAN database recently looking for additional
stories relating to people or incidents in my notes.  There have been
a number of occasions when I have failed to find the story I had
started out with, and at least a few occasions where I failed to find
the story although there were other stories from that paper on the
same day.  Yesterday, I was looking for "James Gale, a Taylor".
Nothing turned up under "James Gale", but I found the story I was
starting from when I searched "Gale, a Taylor".  I'm still learning
its eccentricities, and I may get better results when I have learned
how to outwit it.  (Not a positive feature, of course.)

I want to run through my notes up through 1820, at least.  Before I
decalare that exisiting items have been missed, I will need to check
the items I failed to find, to see whether the paper from the year in
question has been digitized.  I will also need to recheck my ntoes, to
be sure that there isn't a fatal error there.

So far, I certainly wouldn't call the EAN database "worthless", but it
certainly seems inconsistent.  It's good for what it does, but doesn't
replace actually reading the newspapers (although it will replace
actually reading the newspapers, of course).  I'm not paying for it,
either -- there is a question of how many $1000s a year our libraries
should pay for an inconsistent database, even if it isn't a worthless
one.

The slowness of the response is also an annoyance.

One immediate change I would make: There is a list of newspapers
included, by state, with a note as to the total number of issues
digitized.  I would like to see that list include both the county and
town of publication (perhaps with a parallel list arranged by town)
and the specific years covered.  There should also be somewhere in the
file a way of determining whether a year's file is complete, and if
not, exactly what issues are missing.

Joel S. Berson: who was your contact at the Antiquarian Society in
this matter?

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
Date: Wednesday, January 4, 2006 10:13 am
Subject: Re: Online Text News

> Fred,
>
> Have you given comments to the American Antiquarian Society?  When I
> used EAN for the first time there last spring, they expressed
> interest in receiving feedback.
>
> Are you really finding 95% false hits?  (I assume you mean false
> positives.)  Have you uncovered any false negatives?  (A more
> difficult task.)
>
> I find an annoying number of false positives, but nowhere near
> 95%.  (My biggest gripe would be its very slow response.)  And I have
> certainly had successes--for example, finding advertisements for
> exhibitions of camels in the northern colonies between 1735 and 1790;
> finding dancing-masters from 1704 to 1750.
>
> Joel
>
> At 1/4/2006 09:03 AM, you wrote:
> >I forgot to mention that Gale is also working on an online
> collection of
> >19th-century newspapers, probably American in focus.  Hopefully
> this will
> >be better than the worthless (95% false hits in my experience) Early
> >American Newspapers from Readex.
> >
> >Fred Shapiro
>