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Overview
This digital collection (formerly Middle East Newsstand) provides access to the current content and past few decades of more than 150 news sources from across the Arab World, Israel, Southwest Asia, and Africa. Product coverage includes newspapers,wire feeds, trade journals, and select additional sources. Content is represented in English and French (Arabic sources are not included).
Provider
Details
CRL Review
Collection Content
This digital collection provides access to the current content and past few decades of "more than 150 news sources," including more than 30 full text news sources from across the Arab World, Israel, Southwest Asia, and Africa. Content is represented in English and French -- the database does not contain articles in Arabic or Persian, though ProQuest reports that certain Arabic content has been translated into English by the publishers and are included in the product.
Middle East & African Newsstream (renamed in 2016, combining former products Middle East Newsstand and African 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.
Product coverage includes newspapers,wire feeds, trade journals, and select additional sources. Geographic coverage includes broad coverage of Africa and Middle East from syndication and press services and specific counrty coverage through mainstream news publishers. According to ProQuest's title list, a significant portion of content appears to be provided by Syndigate Media Inc, a syndication service founded in Jordan in 2007.1 The title list suggests approximately 75% of sources in the product are provided via Syndigate. In 2013, CRL noted that sources included World News Connection, a foreign news service from the U.S. government. This service has been discontinued, and is no longer listed in the product in current or retrospective form. Notable additional content sources include Aljazeera.net, BBC Monitoring, Independent newspaper group (South Africa), Christian Science Monitor, and Financial Times.
A CRL analysis (September 2017) of the extent of title holdings indicates that while some article coverage begins in the late 1980s and 1990s, the majority of content is from 2008 to the present. The number of sources represented appears to have grown over time, with 2017 coverage larger than any previous year. The ProQuest title list indicates nearly 230 sources are included in the product, though 46 sources are no longer current. 182 titles are listed as current (as of Sept. 2017). See Appendix A for more detailed analysis.
It is worth noting coverage includes selected sources from India, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan (not traditionally covered under other "Middle East" resources).
The publisher indicates that the full content of every newspaper has been indexed. Abstracts (generated through an automated indexing tool) and citations are available. Some sources have been translated from Arabic to English by the publishers.
Delivery
While the articles are available primarily in English or French, including some translated from Arabic, the interface is also available in Arabic. Beck (2012) noted a number of mispellings in the database content that may derive from translation errors rather than transcription variations (“Egpyt” for “Egypt”, “Algera” for “Algeria”, etc.). These could affect search results despite natural language searching features.
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, narrowing of searches by date, document types, and several other fields.
ProQuest does not offer MARC records for the titles.
Strengths and Weaknesses
The database represents widespread coverage of African and Middle East news resources. However, as most of the content is provided by aggregators and syndication services, there is an risk that content may suddenly disappear as a result of contractual licensing arrangements between ProQuest and these providers.
Reviewers
Center for Research Libraries
- Virginia Kerr – Digital Program Manager
- James Simon – Vice President, Collections & Services
Endnotes
1 Syndigate Media Inc. - http://www.syndigate.info/about-us (Accessed 20 September 2017).
2 Thomas J. Beck, “Middle East Newsstand,” The Charleston Advisor January 2012: 32–34. Accessed February 27, 2013.
Appendix
Up to date title list can be downloaded from ProQuest 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