Read all about it!

With many newspaper websites now placing content behind paywalls as they seek to make up for the dramatic decline in print sales, Martin Philip, Academic Liaison Librarian for Economics, Law and Politics, explains how you can get the article you need using Nexis, part of the Library's E-resources collection.

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Most, if not all, newspapers have websites nowadays, however the exact type of content they provide via this medium can vary considerably from publication to publication. The Times, for example, provides readers with a preview of articles, in most cases the first paragraph, before asking you to log in to its subscription service, costing £26.00 per month. Compare this with the Guardian's website which provides free access to all content published from February 1999; however if you require content before this date you will need to log on to a subscription-only archive, which the University subscribes to:

• Guardian archive

To simplify this arrangement, the University subscribes to Nexis, a database that provides full-text access to over 34,000 publications including more than 12,000 news sources. These include UK and worldwide daily and regional newspapers, current affairs magazines, and professional journals. Nexis is updated daily and includes back issues, although archives vary by title.

The interface may not be as intuitive as others, however Nexis has improved over recent years and allows users, as soon as they've logged in, to enter keywords and/or phrases into the search box on the home page.

Nexis home page: copyright LexisNexis

A great feature in Nexis is the ability, whilst searching or reading articles, to add results to a My Documents folder. This folder is only available for 24 hours but lets you organise anything useful you come across into a list that you can then print, download or email to read later on. Just remember to do this before you log off, or it will all vanish!

Newstand (detail) by Martin Hearn
Used under a Creative Commons license

Nexis also provides the ability to export the article's bibliographic data to EndNote or equivalent bibliographic software. One feature not seen in many academic databases is Google Translate allowing you to read any article, whatever the language.

As well as Nexis, we also have subscriptions to Financial Times, The Times, American Historical Newspapers (includes New York Times and Washington Post), Daily Mirror Digital Archive, Guardian and Observer Archive, and the Times of India Archive. You can access Nexis and all of our other newspaper subscriptions via the E-resources Guide:

• E-resources: newspapers

We also provide a guide to get you started using Nexis:

• Nexis UK: quick user guide