CRL licensing and community input features are only available with a CRL member login.
If your institution is a CRL Member please:
log in or sign upCRL Status:
Expired Offer
Feedback:
0 User comments 0 0
Overview
This database (formerly "Latin American Newsstand") provides access to current content and the past two decades for more than 130 full text news sources in Spanish, Portuguese and English from across Central and South America. It also contains content from wire services and regional magazines.
Provider
Details
Subject Areas
Resource Types
CRL Review
Collection Content
This database provides access to current content as well as some content of the past two decades for "130 news sources" from across Central and South America, Mexico and Puerto Rico. It also contains content from wire services and regional magazines.
Coverage includes prominent news sources (news publishers & newswires) from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, and Venezuela. According to ProQuest's title list, the prinicpal sources of content appear to come from Global Network Content Services (d/b/a NoticiasFinancieras1), a news syndication system; and South American Business Information (SABI), an abstracting service based in Brazil covering selected titles 2005-2012. The product also incorporates news services including BBC Monitoring, Christian Science Monitor, AP Spanish, UPI news services, and Wall Street Journal Americas.
Latin American Newsstream (formerly Latin American Newsstand) is offered as a discrete product on the ProQuest platform, but is also incorporated into the broader "International Newsstream" and the comprehensive "Global Newsstream" products available via ProQuest Central.
A CRL analysis of the extent of title holdings indicates that while some holdings go back to the early 1990s, the majority of titles began in 2005; current title holdings peak between 2008 and 2012, leveling off at around 48 titles from 2013-present. While ProQuest represents coverage of 130 news sources in the product, the current title list (as of September 2017) represents only 92 sources, of which only 48 are current. See Appendix A for more detailed analysis.
In March 2013 CRL noted that all 54 titles from U.S. Hispanic Newsstand were suplicated in the Latin American Newsstand product. As of 2017, it appears Latin American Newsstream and U.S. Hispanic Newsstream now offer distinct content, with only central wire services overlapping in content.
Delivery
Articles are available in ASCII format. Automatic tools are available to translate articles from Spanish to English and English to Spanish. Ackerman (2008)2 cautioned that the translation quality varies since it is machine generated. Also, translation of an article abstract was generated only after opening the full article and requesting translation.
The platform offers all features of ProQuest's platform, including faceted options for massaging results and a word-occurrence graph. It offers natural language searching, and narrowing of searches by date, document types, and several other fields.
ProQuest does not offer MARC records for the titles.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Desipte coverage of many prominent news sources from Latin America, coverage does not appear even across all countries of Central and SOuth America. As the majority of content is sourced from a syndication service representing primarily financial news interests, the content is skewed towards sources representing business, economic and financial news (though many of the news sources also cover broader social and political news).
Reviewers
Center for Research Libraries
- Virginia Kerr - Digital Program Manager
- James Simon - Vice President, Collections & Services
Endnotes
1 In 1997, Global Network Content Services was incorporated into International Media Services (IMS), a Latin America-focused media services company. In 2008, GNCS was acquired by Marketwire, which itself was acquired in 2016 by Nasdaq. Source: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hectorbotero/ (Accessed 20 September, 2017)
2 Holly Ackerman, “Latin American Newsstand,” The Charleston Advisor (October 2008): 19–23; Ibid., “Newspaper Databases in Latin American and Latino Studies: Four Key Products,” The Charleston Advisor (January 2010): 11–17. Accessed February 27, 2013.
Appendix
Current title list can be found on ProQuest's site at: http://tls.search.proquest.com/titlelist/jsp/list/tlsSingle.jsp?product…
Community Ratings
Content scope and completeness
Cost and price-structure
Platform and user interface