Reference at Newman Library

Tag: ProQuest

New Database: Chicago Defender

We now have access to the Chicago Defender on ProQuest’s Historical Newspapers platform. Coverage for this important newspaper goes from 1909-2010. As is the case with other newspapers that we have on this platform (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Amsterdam News), coverage includes not just the articles but also ads and all the images in the articles and ads.

A link to the database may be found on the A-Z databases page and selected subject database pages (News, Black Studies, and History).

Although you can look up a journal record for the Chicago Defender in OneSearch, you won’t be able to find articles from it there. Instead, you’ll need to connect to the database itself and search within it. This is due to limitations in way that Ex Libris has made this collection available within Primo (our OneSearch system).

Please let faculty in relevant departments know about this valuable new resource.

New Database: Black Freedom Struggle in the United States

ProQuest has just launched a freely available database called Black Freedom Struggle in the United States. This new resource, which is now listed on our databases pages, brings together primary sources from 1790s to the present from a variety of ProQuest databases, some of which we already have access to and others that are new to us.

Full Text Available Links from OneSearch That Are Failing

A recent update from Ex Libris to the SFX system has broken links into ProQuest databases from OneSearch records. If you have found item in OneSearch and the “full text available” link is programmed to take to you to the text in a ProQuest database, you’ll get a weird error page from SFX that reads “Target URL could not be created” and looks like this:

Error page from SFX

Until a fix can be applied, use this as a workaround: use the A-Z journal tool from Serials Solutions to look up access for the needed item and use the links from there into the appropriate database.

Please note that you’ll only see this particular problem with links from OneSearch to ProQuest databases; links to Gale, EBSCO, etc, are not affected.

This problem is affecting all customers using Primo for their discovery service. A fix from Ex Libris may come at any moment. If it looks like Ex Libris is having problems with getting the fix out in a timely manner, we have a plan B here at CUNY to downgrade ProQuest links if there are also full text links to the same content from other vendors (Gale, EBSCO, etc.)

If you want to see the problem in action, try to connect to the full text for this article.