FINDING EDITORIAL PAGES ON THE WEB

By: Charles Bowen A Daily Dose Of Opinion From Here, There, And Everywhere



To get started, visit the site at http://www.opinion-pages.org



The Internet has been great for finding news reports. At various online
venues, breaking stories as well as backlogs of filed reports from
months - sometimes even years - back, can be searched by keyword,
browsed by topics, and sought out by geographic locations and the names
of the publications. But when it comes to finding editorial pages,
columns, and Op-Ed pieces, the Net has been a little slow on the draw.



Fortunately, a Canadian journalist named Montgomery Kersell has ridden
to the rescue, setting up a far-reaching gateway to editorial pages
throughout North America and well beyond. His Opinion-Pages (Think:
Opinions, Ideas and Commentary) give you fast access to opinion pieces
from some 600 English-language papers around the world.



Indexed daily, the database can be searched by keyword with numerous
modifiers. You also can keyword-search topical collections of
columnists' pages, and if you're looking for the opinion page or
letter-to-the-editor columns of specific papers, you can browse a
geographic listing.



To use this resource, visit the site at http://www.opinion-pages.org,
where the introductory page provides hyperlinks and icons to its
various navigation tools. If you want to target your search to a
general topic and survey a backlog of opinion pieces, click one of the
half-dozen icons in the center of the page - 'Political & General,'
'Business & Finance,' 'Technology,' 'Arts & Leisure,' 'Health,' and
'Sports' - which will lead to a prompt for a keyword or phrase. Each
'hit' is presented with a direct hyperlink to the page on the
originating site, along with an abstract from that particular Web page.



Incidentally, these summaries sometimes are rather cryptic. The
software that generates them, called the Webinator, tries to skip
irrelevant text and present actual content. The results can be less
than perfect, and the specific article you seek may be somewhere
farther down the page, past the point where the Webinator software has
truncated its abstract.



Meanwhile, if you want to keyword-search today's editorials and Op-Ed
pages in the database, click the introductory page's 'Go Directly to
the Search Interface' link. The resulting search box invites you to
specify a word or phrase in the 'Search for this:' box. Optionally, you
also can narrow your search by excluding words or a phrase entered in
the 'Without this:' box.



Other options on the search form let you designate a proximity (line,
sentence, paragraph, or page) and a word form (exact match, plurals &
possessives, or any word forms). You can even rank the importance to
your search of word order, word proximity, database frequency, document
frequency, and position in text.



If you need to research editorials and columns from a specific part of
the world, click the introductory page's 'Linked by Geographic Region'
link. The next screen then lists links to each Canadian province, each
U.S. state, and about three dozen countries, from Australia to Zambia.
After you've made your selection, the sites produce more links, these
to the latest offerings on the online editorial pages of specific
newspapers in that region.



Other considerations in using this resource for your work:



1. The Webinator Search Engine, used throughout the site, may be
unfamiliar to you. Fortunately, it has extensive help files (http://www.opinion-

pages.org/search.html), with examples of how to form a query, using
word forms, controlling proximity, interpreting the results, viewing
matching information, finding similar documents and viewing parent
documents.



2. Updates for the columnists' databases are scheduled each day between
9 p.m. and 1 a.m. EDT. And the Opinions, Ideas and Commentary database
is slated for re-indexing between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. and contains Op-Ed
pages from newspapers and magazines.



3. Webmaster Kersell lives and works in Scarborough, Ontario. He has
worked as a reporter, photographer, and editor for daily and weekly
community newspapers, and also has been a writer and copy editor for
information technology trade publications.