News and Newspapers Online lists hundreds of news resources from around the world in a variety of languages that offer free access to current, general-interest, full-text news.
Criteria for Inclusion
We have adopted these guidelines, listed roughly in order of importance, to help us determine which sites will be included.
The news presented must be based on facts, however truthful it may be. (Sorry, fans of The Onion.)
The news must be current, preferably as up-to-date as the print version.
The news resource must provide free access to a significant amount of content, rather than requiring payment to get to anything at all.
A significant amount of the news must be full-text, not merely headlines or short summaries.
The link to the news resource must be reliable.
The news must be of general interest rather than specialised, focusing only on business or computer news, for example.
The news resource should be Web-based or at least make use of technologies that allow a user to access content within the browser window; a good example of this is news published in PDF that is accessible with a free browser plug-in application. This would exclude news resources that are Gopher- or e-mail-based or that require a Telnet connection.
Preferably, the news resource should not require registration.
If a resource has other particularly strong or unique qualities, we will likely include it. Resources will be evaluated on their own merits as well as relative to other resources in the same category; therefore, the bar would be set relatively low for jurisdictions that are under-represented and relatively higher for jurisdictions that are already represented well. Bear in mind that our staff is familiar with only a few languages and, therefore, we sometimes make a more-or-less educated guess about including a resource. Please let us know about worthy links you have uncovered. We will carefully consider all requests in light of the above guidelines.
Recognition and Awards That This Site Has Won
News and Newspapers Online has won much positive attention, including being named one of ten "Best Reference Web Sites" by Library Journal magazine in its 15 April 1997 issue; being voted a "Hot Site" by Starting Point users (18 May 1997); being named among the "Best of the Web" by Suite 101 contributing editor for newspapers, Bud Mortenson (01 June 1998); and being awarded Library Spot's Spotlight Award (27 May 1999). In the 01 February 1998 edition of his Cyberbia column, David Colker of the Los Angeles Times says that News and Newspapers Online is "one of the most complete and easiest to use" sites of its kind and "is invaluable to anyone seeking news from a particular part of the world or studying a foreign language."
History
This resource was first developed by Dr Randy D Ralph. Cathy Carr later expanded the site's content and added maps, courtesy of the Geography Department of UNCG.
Added a broken link reporting feature, allowing users to report broken links to news resources. (1 June 2005)
Reviewed code and made many behind-the-scenes changes to ensure compliance with Web accessibility standards. (Fall 2004)
Redesigned Personalised List feature so that users can access their information from any Internet computer. (February 2003)
Adding more resources to the most frequently-visited states, provinces, territories, and countries. (on-going, began Summer 2000)
Converted from a Microsoft SQL Server 7 to Microsoft SQL Server 2000. (28 May 2002)
Redesigned personalised list creation function so that users no longer have to wait for and make their selections from the complete list of all news resources; changed other scripts so that they display a certain number of news resources per page; both changes allow users to access news resources faster. (August-September 2001)
Converted from a Microsoft Access 97 database accessed via an ODBC connection to a Microsoft SQL Server 7 database accessed via an OLE connection. (July 2001)
Added rudimentary multi-lingual functionality to personalised lists. (February 2001, discontinued February 2003)
Added sort options for results lists to give users more control over how they view results. (Winter 1999)
Made behind-the-scenes improvements using HTML 4.0 to enhance accessibility. (Summer/Fall 1999 and on-going)
Linked newspapers to which the University Libraries subscribe to the Library's catalogue for easy access to holdings information. (Spring 1999)
Added the Personalised List option that uses cookies. (January and February 1999)
Moved the site to a database that dynamically generates web pages with consistent and up-to-date content. (Summer 1998)
Implemented Cascading Style Sheets for a consistent appearance across the site using UNCG's school colours. (Summer 1997)
Technical Bits
News and Newspapers Online has been tested and should work well on any browser, including the latest versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Lynx, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, Safari, and WebTV. On the server side, it uses ASP and ADO to serve data from a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database, as well as server-side includes to achieve a consistent appearance and cut down on cosmetic maintenance. On the client side, News and Newspapers Online uses XHTML 1.0 and CSS to achieve maximum accessibility and consistency across platforms. It does not use frames or Java. Client-side scripting is limited to non-essential functionality and where tables are used to format visual presentation, they are labelled as such. Cookies keep track of user log-ins for those with an account and user sessions for our ASP environment.
