NPR Transcripts in LexisNexis
Searching Sources in LexisNexis -- Organic Peaches in California Depends on Immigration Reform
Last week, during spring break, I was driving home to my family in South Carolina. It was Saturday evening. I was listening to NPR and something interesting came on the radio. "Hmm," I thought. That would make a nice topic to build a blog around."A week later, I can't remember a thing about the story. Was it about children? Something about demographics? Shoot.
When I got back to the library, I realized I could look in LexisNexis to find the transcript from NPR and figure out what I was listening to. (I could have done this from my parents' home using the VPN, but I was busy crocheting and finding furniture in junk stores.)
LexisNexis includes news sources from all over the world, including articles from newspapers, transcripts from television and radio, book and film reviews, and reports from the newswires. But on Monday morning I wanted to know what I'd been listening to on NPR, so I went to the library's home page and clicked on databases in the first column. In the second box on the databases page, I typed in LexisNexis. There are several different parts to LexisNexis -- the one that contains the news is LexisNexis Academic. (There are no scholarly works in here. I think it's called "Academic," because it's marketed to academic libraries. Yeah.)
LexisNexis will open to this screen:
Click on the "Guided News Screen" tab at the top. (If you want to search all news sources, you can use this screen.)On the next screen, choose, News Transcripts from the first dropdown menu, and National Public Radio Transcriptions from the second dropdown menu:
Notice that you can also get transcripts from the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, the Official Kremlin Intnl News Broadcast, and CNBC/Dow Jones Business Video among others. If you look at all of the drop down menus from the first box and their secondary dropdown menus (i.e., the second dropdown menu changes depending on the first menu) you'll find an amazing variety of sources. Enjoy!
Then, to find the report I was listening to, I remembered that I drove from about noon til 7pm on Saturday. The earlier time I listened to audio books. So I must have been listening to All Things Considered. My search looked like this (Note "all things" in the "show" field):
And the results:
There it is! A peach farmer in California talking about the need for large numbers of workers to support organic farming. He sees legalizing immigration from Mexico as the only way to make delicious tasting peaches.
However, as I look at the list of transcripts, I realize that I must have started listening after the reports on the large numbers of child abuse cases reported by juveniles in institutions in Texas and across the United States. Hmm...many interesting articles...
(If you use LexisNexis to search newspapers, you can search just the Miami Herald by choosing U.S. News in the first box, Florida New Sources in the second, and Miami Herald in the very bottom box: StepFive: search this publication title.)
