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Searching Presidential Documents On-Line: Advantages and Limitations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2013
Extract
Along with the need for heightened skills in managing huge amounts of information, the use of new electronic resources requires its own caution: researchers should not allow the ease of information gathering to tempt them to rely exclusively on these electronic sources. The rapidly growing online data and information are at best incomplete and at worst inaccurate. Despite potential problems, researchers can minimize the ill effects of on-line sources and ultimately benefit tremendously from their use. The speed and easy access of these sources enable researchers to gather enormous amounts of information quickly and to conduct far more comprehensive searches for particular types of materials than is feasible or even possible by more traditional means.
Drawing on our experience gathering White House communications regarding health care during the 103rd Congress, we offer some advice and warnings about electronic document gathering. Because of the variations in software and changes in communications technology, however, we do not provide here a step-by-step on-line user's manual. Rather, we offer some technical pointers in accessing the on-line archives.
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- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1996
Footnotes
1.
We thank Steve Freedkin, Greg Haley, Martha Kumar, Claudia O'Grady, Richard Pious, Matthew Stevens, Terry Sullivan, Sarah Tobias, Harrison White, and anonymous reviewers for their assistance and comments. This research is part of a project at the University of Minnesota and Columbia University's Center for the Social Sciences on public opinion and health care reform supported by a Robert Wood Johnson Investigator Award to Jacobs and Shapiro.
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Notes
2. The main Texas A&M on-line service is accessible via gopher at gopher.tamu.edu. Political science users may select the “Political Science and Politics” listing from the main menu. This service also provides access to gopher servers world wide.
3. The University of Michigan Library server is accessible via gopher at una.hh.lib.umich.edu. Questions about this source may be addressed, using e-mail, to ulibrary@um.cc.umich.edu.
4. The California Legislature Gopher Service is accessible at sen.ca.gov and offers connections to 23 U.S. state government servers, including 12 state legislature gopher services.
5. For those studying Congress, The Washington Post Company's Legi-Slate service provides probably the most thorough archive available. Legi-Slate lists bill texts, committee hearing transcripts, legislative histories, committee reports, and much other vital information on every bill introduced since the beginning of the 103rd Congress. As with the other on-line services, materials may be located by key-word searches as well as by chamber and date. Though tremendously useful, most of the information available through Legi-Slate is limited to paying subscribers. At this writing, discounted university-affiliated subscriptions begin at $750 per year. Legi-Slate publicizes its archive's completeness as a major selling point. The nonsubscribing general public is permitted only very limited access to Legi-Slate's archive via the Internet. Another on-line service offering free public access to documents from the 103rd and 104th Congresses is Thomas. This service is accessible via Mosaic and Netscape at http://thomas.loc.gov.
6. This is similar to searching for materials on NEXUS, the electronic archive of published media reports available to paying subscribers. It includes articles and editorials from most major newspapers and news magazines, many local newspapers, and materials from numerous other sources. The bulk of its current news holdings were published after 1985.
7. The SunSITE service and that at the University of California, Irvine, give users access to “Veronica,” a searching method that looks for key words in document titles in over 5,000 databases containing, as of November 1994, over 15 million indexed items. UC Irvine's service is accessible via gopher at gopher.uci.edu. Questions about this archive may be addressed, via e-mail, to uci-cwis-support@uci.edu. The University of Minnesota's service is accessible via gopher at gopher.tc.umm.edu and allows key-word-in-title searches for other archives.