January 25, 2002

Once-Trustworthy Newspaper Databases Have Become Unreliable and Frustrating

By SCOTT CARLSON

Supreme Court decision led publishers to purge much archival material, to the dismay of scholars

Before Xiaotian Chen confronts a class of undergraduates, usually to teach them about methods of library research, he likes to get his material together months ahead of time. Mr. Chen was teaching a course last fall at Truman State University, where he was an electronic-resources librarian; naturally, he started gathering material in the spring.

While digging through Lexis-Nexis, he

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