Cross-search highlights the related content in the News (historical and current newspapers) for ProQuest Congressional customers. Users will only see and be able to access news and historic news content for which their institution should have access. Congressional is dynamically linking individual records on the Congressional platform with those related news items. This means when the researcher is looking at a document or abstract on Congressional, they will see related news on the right side and can click to link to their ProQuest news article.
Cross search ties existing Newspaper and Historic Newspaper subscriptions with your valuable Congressional content. Most importantly, puts the government documents in context of what the newspapers were saying about the event at the time.
With cross search, users can see newspaper articles about government scandals (such as Teapot Dome, Watergate, and Iran-Contra), wars (the Civil War, the Philippine Insurrection, and Vietnam) and disasters (including the 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco, or the Titanic sinking).
Some document types are excluded from cross search. These include:
We may add these in the future, but wanted to initially focus on the congressional and executive branch publications.
1. Do any search as usual.
2. Select your document by clicking on the citation/abstract link, or the hyperlinked title.
When you look at the document abstract or text, there will be a pane on the right side that says "Related news". These results are taken from the news content in ProQuest.
3. Click on any of the news items. This will bring up a new tab in your browser with the news item. The original document results list will still be in that original browser tab.
If a user has access to Congressional AND access to newspapers or historic newspapers, they will see relevant newspaper content “Related News” on the right hand side.
An example of what the results look like, using the 1912 Titanic hearing, is here.
For the relevant news results, we depend on 3 main things: a date range around the document, the correct news content for each customer, and the key words and key phrases of the original document.
The keywords and phrases are then parsed through a 800+ entry “stop word list” which disregards common words. Examples include: consideration, your, thanks, tracking, meantime.
Relevance - Relevancy is much higher for documents on particular and specific topics, however, it is less useful for larger documents without a focused topic. For example, “Titanic” hearings bring back excellent cross search results while the “Annual Report for the Department of War” bring back less relevant Related News results.