Under a bushel and in your face

Some people don’t only hide their lights under bushels, they try hard to make the bushels look extra-dull. Others shine out unashamed. So here are two great online resources, one a dedicated light-hider and the other a shameless shiner.

Hidden treasure

If you wanted to publish an online database of magazines, but you didn’t want anyone to look at it, you could do worse than call it Infotrac Custom Journals. Well, honestly! How appealing is that? But don’t be put off – here’s why…

It’s a pity about the name, because it’s full of good things. Westminster library members get a hand-picked list of specialist journals which can be hard to find in a library in printed form nowadays. In fact some of them we do have in print (Apollo and Design Week in Westminster Reference Library, for instance). But the online version is available anywhere you can reach the Internet, armed with your trusty library card.

Farmers Weekly, History Today, Money Management, Scientific American… none of these is my choice of a good chill-out read in bed. But if you have a specialist interest and need/want to keep up with the latest in your field, Infotrac Custom Journals might have the mag for you.

(From the Gateway to websites, select "News & magazines". Infotrac Custom Journals is a Key Link.
Hint: if you want a user-friendly list of the journals, together with the details of how long Infotrac have been archiving them, click on the "all listed here" link.)

Treasure on show

News UK, on the other hand, is a really good title, because it tells you exactly what you are getting. Up to a point…

The "up to a point" thing is that you have to dig into News UK to find out exactly how huge it is. Search it and you are searching 115 UK newspapers all at once (or separately if you want to). All the national dailies, regional papers from Aberdeen to Yorkshire, and more than 40 magazines – it’s an impressive list.

What you will find is news stories, obviously, but the interpretation of what counts as news can be quite loose, so it’s always worth a search even if the item you are looking for is more of a feature than actual hard news. No promises, but I’ve had some agreeably unexpected results. News UK is very heavily used by library members, and rightly so.

(From the Gateway to websites, select "News & magazines". News UK is a Key Link.)

Picture credit: hotblack/morguefile.com