FACTS.com (http://www.facts.com) is a database comprising a 20‐year backfile of news articles relating to current world events, including weekly news updates and hourly Reuters wire updates. Now separated from the well‐known Facts On File, Inc., book publisher, FACTS.com is published by Facts On File News Services. This fee‐based site downloads its contents rapidly into an easily navigated site design. Arrangement and graphics are aesthetically pleasing and organized in a logical manner, yet do not take long to load ‐ a key point for a resource which serves as a basic point of contact for concise information. The left‐hand side navigation bar and right‐hand side information screen are consistent throughout the site, so navigation is not overly complicated. For a site containing “75,000 full‐text news articles dating from January 1980”, this is a very important feature.
The database includes news items from seven databases, including:
Issues and Controversies on File;
Today’s Science on File;
Editorials on File,
The World Almanac; and
the Funk & Wagnall’s New Encyclopedia.
These can be accessed via either an internal search engine or a menu. The search engine searches the full text of the site’s contents, making it a valuable tool. Sort options allow users to choose results sorted by date or by relevance ‐ a welcome option. Additionally, the search may be refined to include an optional date range, or executed with a custom search engine that searches by individual database. I found the basic engine to be an extremely simple way to cull information from a range of sources that would have taken quite a while to review manually.
The menu includes an overview of articles, subject indexes, the current day’s news from Reuters (with a one‐week backfile), and a brief page of information about the database. One especially helpful resource is a listing of top news stories, by year. An additional feature of the site is the construction of “approximately half a million internal hyperlinks.” This feature allows users to execute a single search and have presented to them a variety of related links, thus decreasing time spent executing searches and increasing time spent reading the material. Between the search engine and the menu, users are provided multiple ways to locate information which I think accurately reflect common methods of research in print resources: some degree of browsing (via the menu), coupled with term‐specific searches (via the search engine).
FACTS.com presents its material in a simple format, which provides the relevant information without requiring the user to wait for flashy images and complex scripts to load. The purpose of this site is to convey information, a task which it accomplishes well. Articles are presented in a clear format, available to updated browsers without software or hardware limitations. Photographic reproductions are included yet do not take long to load. The site includes a great deal of easily accessible information yet is not cumbersome to the user. The only faults I found in the site were two broken links, one of which was from the menu itself, not allowing access to the daily Reuters news. I am, however, happy to report that after regular use of this site, only on a single instance have I encountered such a problem.
The authority of this site goes unquestioned. FACTS.com’s publisher, Facts on File News Services, is a subsidiary of the World Almanac Education Group, which has been providing research and reference information since 1940. Scores of users have found the site’s earlier incarnation, a CD‐ROM, to be of high quality and an incredibly useful resource. The database producers have improved on this already useful tool by placing the information on the Web, thus eliminating a number of hardware limitations.
Without reservation, I recommend FACTS.com to anyone, whether an individual, a library, or other, who needs to locate accurate news information on world events. Its format is easy to navigate without a great deal of instruction. Hourly news reports make it highly relevant to even the most current of events, and its 20‐year backfile of information provides access to an incredible amount of world information.
