Publications and Bibliographies

Reviewed by Shari T. Grove, Boston College July 1994

Ethnic NewsWatch, 1991-. SoftLine Information, Inc., 65 Broad St., Stamford CT 06801, (203) 975-8292, 1-800-524-7922. Ethnic NewsWatch is available on an annual, monthly, bimonthly or quarterly basis. Releases are cumulative. An annual subscription with quarterly cumulative updates costs about $2,200. Inquire about promotions and discounts when ordering. The 1991-92 backfile costs $2,995.00 (for 40,000+ full-text articles). Other options are a bimonthly subscription of 6 discs/year for $2,750, or a monthly subscription of 12 discs/year for $3,599.

Introduction:

Ethnic NewsWatch (ENW) is a full-text CD-ROM database providing access to articles that appeared in 99 domestic ethnic newspapers and journals. Only English or Spanish language articles are included. ENW has easy-to-use menu-driven search software, which permits keyword searching, among its many useful features. Articles reflect issues from both urban and rural areas. Although editorial decisions are made by the officers of the corporation, ENW looks to its editorial board for suggestions and advice. ENW has a short publishing time lag of between five to eight weeks. ENW intends to give you the other sides of the stories on issues of local, national and global importance by providing access to articles published in the domestic ethnic press. ENW consists of two databases--a database of full-text periodical articles and a directory of information about the publications included in the full-text database. The intent of ENW is to provide access to articles published in the ethnic press. Publications are predominently secular in nature. ENW provides access to voices on local and regional issues or concerns which may not be reflected in the mainstream press.

User instruction:

A printed user guide accompanies ENW. In addition, most of the user instruction information is either available onscreen or can be called up on useful help screens, replete with examples. Directions for searching are available in either English or Spanish. ENW also has English or Spanish language search options. Although there is no printed or online thesaurus, one can browse indexes of selected categories, such as keyword, subject, geographic location, or author in order to determine the occurance of specific terms in the database. Overall, the system is user friendly.

Scope and coverage:

At the time of this review, ENW provides approximately 99,000 articles from 99 periodicals from across the United States. While the majority are weekly publications, daily, biweekly and quarterly newspapers and magazines also appear. Each title represents one of the following broad ethnic groups: African American, 35 titles; Hispanic American, 20 titles; Asian/Pacific Island American, 9 titles; Arabic, 3 titles; Native American, 13 titles; Jewish, 9 titles; and, Eastern European, 8 titles. Coverage is from 1990. ENW includes indexing and full-text reviews of books, movies, theater, arts and musical recordings. Articles are currently added at the rate of 4,000 monthly. Advertisements are excluded. There is no print version of ENW.

Because a limited number of ethnic publications are indexed in ENW, one should consult Gale Directory of Publications and Broadcast Media to identify the range of available ethnic periodicals. Two other helpful publications are: Ethnic Periodicals in Contemporary America: An Annotated Guide (1990), compiled by Sandra L. Jones, or The Ethnic Press in the United States: A Historical Analysis and Handbook (1987), by Sally M. Miller.

Record structure:

ENW is menu-driven. Its commands prompts are available either in English or Spanish. Searches are entered on the opening menu screen in selected search fields. Since only broad ethnic group categories (e. g., African-Americans) are provided, it is best to do a keyword search for a specific ethnic group (e. g., Haitians). The context-sensitive search fields are: article key word, subject, title, author, type, publication date, names of people, geographic location, ethnic group and publication name. Use of truncation and Boolean search operators are supported. A strong feature of the database is the specific categories it provides for searching types of articles. These are: interview, editorial, column, obituaries, reviews of books, movies, theater, records and television. Forthcoming additional categories will include biography, food, fashion, sports and business. Onscreen instructions including function key commands make searching, printing and downloading very easy.

Comparisons with related databases and summary of positive aspects:

Clearly ENW stands alone as a source for accessing full-text articles in ethnic publications, and is unrelated to any other database.The principle value of ENW is access to the domestic ethnic press. For the most part it is a current newspaper database and reflects people's voices and concerns in the popular press. The prospective audience for ENW is very broad. It makes primary source materials available to undergraduates. ENW might be of particular interest to communications students. A library subscription to ENW provides access to articles from 99 ethnic newspapers and journals without requiring libraries to establish and maintain individual subscriptions to each of these titles.

Recommendations for improvement:

More editorial and historical information about the individual publications would be welcome. The addition of a general on-line index, from which one could select terms and initiate searches, would be especially helpful.

Other published reviews have appeared in: Booklist. Vol. 90 , No. 18; May 15, 1994, p.1704-1707; Library Journal. Vol. 118 , No. 7; April 15, 1993, p.136-8; and Multicultural Review. Vol. 2, No. 1; March 1993, p.90.