Newsbank has revamped their look.

On Monday, January 7, Newsbank, the company we use for electronic access to the Nashua Telegraph, the Union Leader, and many other newspapers and magazines from across the country, changed their search interface.

You can still search with keywords and date, as before. But you may want to refine your search even further. There are several ways to do this:

• Word count—When creating your initial search, you can now limit it so that you only get articles within a certain word count. This allows you to weed out short articles if you're looking for substance, or weed out long articles if you're going for brevity.
• Author
• Caption
• Headline
• Source

There is more flexibility in the search interface, too. If you've already used the three standard search boxes (say, for keywords, date, and author) but want to include more search criteria (say, word count or source), you can now add more rows of search boxes.

Below the search boxes, there are three tabs that you can also use to limit your search up front. One tab is for location. You can choose to search publications from a specific state or a region (New England, middle Atlantic, and so on). The second tab, Source Types, lets you indicate whether you want to look at newspapers, magazines, academic journals, newswires, or online sources. For each selection, you can click to see the available titles and date ranges. The third tab, Source List, lets you select specific news titles from an alphabetical list.

If you prefer to just do a simple keyword search, you can narrow the search results list later. When your search results come up, Newsbank will show the article title, word count, and the approximate number of pages the article would be when printed out. It will also show your keyword, or search term, in context so that you can quickly see whether the article is on topic. To the left of the search results list, you'll see a list of ways to refine the results. Under the heading "View Results," there will be links that allow you to winnow down the list of results by:

• Year—For each year, the number of articles available is displayed in parentheses. This can help you quickly see what years the story or topic was big in the news.
• Resource type—if you are only interested in magazine articles, you can click “magazines” and eliminate newspaper articles from your list.
• Location—Use this if you want to focus on news from a particular state.
• Source title—If you only want articles from the Nashua Telegraph or the Boston Globe, you can use this to focus your results on those newspapers.

Once you narrow your results to a particular year, location, etc., a dropdown menu appears above the results, and you can select a different year or location from the list to look at those results.

When you’ve found a useful article, you can print it or email it. If you're using bibliographic citation software such as EndNote, ProCite, or RefWorks, Newsbank can also export its article citations to that software for you.

Newsbank and other databases are available within the library, and most are also available from outside the library. Just go to the Nashua Public Library's main database page, www.nashua.lib.nh.us/IbrowseAdultAlpha.htm, click on the database you’re interested in, and type in the last 5 digits of your Nashua Public Library card number. Give us a call at the Reference Desk (603-589-4611) if you have any questions.