New York Time Reneges On Offer -- Effect on USF Students: Probably None.

Well, what the Gray Lady giveth with one hand she taketh away with the other. Just last week we reported in ZiefBrief that the New York Times was going to start making access to their premium "Times Select" databases free to all students and faculty with a .edu e-mail address. Today we learn they misspoke. According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education: "Vivian Schiller, vice president and general manager of NYTimes.com, says that Times Select archives will be available only to students of colleges that subscribe to database companies that carry Times content. The change comes 'out of respect and compliance with these agreements that we already have in place,' Ms. Schiller says." USF currently subscribes to the ProQuest collection of the New York Times which goes back to 1851. So the net effect to students and faculty at our institution should be nil. There may be a delay while the NYT figures out a way to filter out those .edu institutions that don't currently subscribe to such third-party databases, but ultimately users will have a choice of using either ProQuest, the Times web page, the NYT  database on Westlaw, or the "New York Times" source on LexisNexis (Westlaw and Lexis only go back to 06/1980) to search the NYT archives.