FPinfomart Adds Globe and Mail
This is big news for Canadian law librarians!
CanWest has announced that its Canadian-based electronic subscription news service, FPinfomart, will be adding access to the Globe and Mail. From its November 27, 2006 press release, FPinfomart Adds Globe and Mail Content:
Through an agreement between The Globe and Mail and CanWest MediaWorks Inc., FPinfomart will license The Globe and Mail and distribute content from the newspaper electronically through the FPinfomart product, including two years of archives and daily feeds. The Globe and Mail will be available to FPinfomart customers as part of the base subscription package.
This was the one major Canadian English news title that was not accessible through FPinfomart and was a major reason law firm librarians have not, to date, made this their primary news research source. The Globe was previously only available via the Globe and Mail website or searchable with other newspapers on Lexis Nexis after Factiva moved all of its law customer contracts over to Lexis.
According to the press release, the 2 years of archived content will be available starting January 1, 2007. I am unclear whether this will be a “rolling archives” where there is only ever 2 years of archived content available, or if the archives will build so that, for example, in a year’s time there will be 3 years of archived content and in 2 years there will be 4 years of content. I’ve put in a call in to them to hopefull clarify.
Still, this now creates some more competition in the Canadian news research resources front.
It’s nice to see Factiva’ monopoly on The Globe and Mail coming to an end. We have a direct account with Factiva because we are a corporate library, but have never found the service exemplary. For our current awareness and competitive intelligence services we use NewsEdge, which is now part of the Thomson organization. NewsEdge has excellent customer service but the news archive goes back only three months. Still, for the purposes of our daily services it’s excellent and they provide high quality support.
An update: I confirmed through my sales rep that the archives will build up over time; that is, in 2 years’ time, there will be 4 years worth of Globe and Mail archives.
Someone asked me to check into things like charts, tables and diagrams, whether they will be included. Readers of the Globe in paper know that visuals such as these are being used increasingly to tell the news story. Unfortunately that doesn’t look promising–I was told whatever sorts of things now included in other newspapers is what we will see. As well, I don’t believe this sort of coverage is included with other Globe sources (Lexis, Factiva). Someone correct me if I’m wrong on that point.
The “trackback” comment above is a bit incongruous. Looks like someone at the Globe and Mail has set up a page to help them monitor news about the Globe, and it has picked up this year old post.