Well, this sucks (SABR forced to discontinue ProQuest access)

Aparently it's not their fault - the people who run the searchable data base of old newspapers (almost full run of NY Times, Washington Post and Chicago Tribune) have decided that they will only offer their service to public libraries, not historical societies:

http://www.sabr.org/sabr.cfm?a=cms,c,1840

Anyone who has ever done any historical research knows what a blow this is going to be, particularly anyone working on a book right now or who was planning to in the future. I've used it on my day job, as well, finding old box scores, etc., etc.

 

Re: Well, this sucks (SABR discontinues ProQuest access)

This was actually announced back in like October, so not a big shock. Word is Paper of Record is going to be free (we'll see, it was supposed to happen this week and it hasn't). Probaseballarchive.com is free and not bad, albeit somewhat limited.

 

Re: Well, this sucks (SABR discontinues ProQuest access)

Paper of Record is all right if you want The Sporting News. But the searchability lags far behind ProQuest. And they don't have the dailies.

I hadn't seen it before, I guess. I just saw it today when I went there trying to dig up some things.

This is going to be a real pain. Thank God my book is finished.

 

Re: Well, this sucks (SABR discontinues ProQuest access)

Not familiar with this, but you can't just go to a public library to do your research?

 

Re: Well, this sucks (SABR discontinues ProQuest access)

In short, no.

No public library within hundreds of miles of many people, for example, has Washington Post archives dating back to the late 19th century. Or Chicago Tribune. Or NY Times. Only a select few big-city libraries, as I understand it, offer ProQuest. So even if your library had those papers, you can't search, for example, through thousands of pages for the specific ones where your source is named. When my guy got married, it was a one paragraph brief in the middle of the summer. Needle in a haystack. But ProQuest searched the PDFs and spit that right out.

And it gets even harder once guys retire. Maybe there were three articles written about your subject in the 20 years after he retired. You gonna search all those papers through all those years on the off chance something might exist on C4 somewhere that will help your project?

Plus, you could perform research any time, day or night, in the privacy of your own home.

This is a blow, trust me.

 

Re: Well, this sucks (SABR discontinues ProQuest access)

Huge blow, yes. And yes, this is old news (which is why I was using ProQuest every hour of my spare time throughout December ;D).

But change the subject line, please. SABR, in no way, wanted to discontinue ProQuest access; it was completely the other way around.

Every member of that organization, myself included, who used PQ regularly is torn up over this news -- and 12 days into the new year, its absence is already being felt.

Newspaperarchive.com is another avenue for online research, btw. I'm waiting for PaperofRecord to become free (not sure why it hasn't yet).

Hopefully, ProQuest will become available again. I'm not holding my breath. But man, I sure hope so.

 

Got it.

 

Yep. I've taken up drinking and main-lining heroin.

 

In some instances, your local, big city or state library may have free access to the NY Times on Proquest, or, depending on your region, one of their other papers - you often only need your local library card number to access. The Boston Public Library, for example, makes the NY Times and Globe, through 1922 I believe, available for free on Proquest to anyone with a card from a Massachusetts Library. Proquest decided to market only to libraries, but it was the single greatest historical source out there. As someone who has literally spent months of my life scrolling through microfilm doing research, you could often find more in five minutes on Proquest than five weeks of microfilm. It was like going from Crayons to word processing.

Many universities, particularly major ones, also have ProQuest. Easy dough for a student to do some historical research on Proquest for someone else.

 

Well, I am a current student at a university with access to ProQuest. If someone would like to pay me to find and download PDFs for them, feel free to PM me.

 

Just an FYI for those that care that the Paper of Record (which has the Sporting News) is now free, although their search tool sucks.