Finding an online-only article from the late 90’s may feel like this…
Newspapers on the internet are designed to give readers the latest news. Publishers also put some material behind a paywall for subscribers only. That sometimes makes the old stories hard to find. The first place to look is the newspaper’s online archive. Your access to the New York Times archive, through the library’s subscription, is excellent. If you haven’t already, the next time you’re on campus, go to this link and sign up using your Chicago-Kent email address. This gives you unlimited access to archive articles from before 1923 and after 1980. For those between those years, you’re limited to five per day. If you’re bumping up against that limit, contact the reference desk and we’ll work on a solution.
Your next step would probably be to find newspaper articles in a subscription database like Lexis or Westlaw. This is one place where it’s hard to tell who has what. For example, Lexis has the New York Times, but it used to be on Westlaw and Bloomberg. Don’t bother trying to remember who has what. Just search the title in the library’s catalog and pay close attention to the date range for a particular database.
Chicago Public Library also gives city residents access to an extensive archive of the Chicago Tribune, as well as the Chicago Defender and other African-American newspapers. All you need is a library card. Live outside the city? Talk to your friendly C-K librarian.
What about the most ephemeral, slippery things? Those articles that were only published online are lost forever once the website takes them down right? Thank goodness for the Wayback Machine. The Internet Archive has been crawling the internet since most of our 1L’s were in preschool. They captured websites so that you can use their Wayback Machine to find, for example, the Detroit Free Press’ special multimedia coverage of the foreclosure crisis.
Happy researching!
