Ethnic NewsWatch: A DEI Database Quick Look

What is it?

Ethnic NewsWatch (ENW) is a searchable database of popular and academic sources from ethnic and minority presses. The database offers multidisciplinary and in-depth articles written from the following ethnic categories: African American/Caribbean/African, Asian/Pacific Islander, European/Eastern European, Hispanic, Jewish, and Native Peoples. Ethnic NewsWatch has significantly more coverage and is only moderately more expensive than the databases discussed in our February 2023 review “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Databases that help Students Meet the California Community Colleges’ Ethnic Studies Graduation Requirement and More.” For example, a phrase search for "Indian Child Welfare Act" in EBSCOhost's Ethnic Diversity Source had 151 results, Gale OneFile Diversity had 102 results, and ENW had 1167 results.

With ENW, students see newspaper coverage from community papers, which provides perspectives on issues that come from within the communities themselves. There is also coverage by and about people who are prominent in their own communities (who might not be known outside of their communities). The peer-reviewed journals available, such as American Indian Quarterly, publish scholarly articles on topics using research methodologies that reflect the philosophies and understandings that they get from their communities.

ENW is multidisciplinary, so librarians can recommend to students doing a search in multidisciplinary databases, like Academic Search Complete, that they also run the same search in Ethnic NewsWatch to get diverse perspectives on their topic.

Quick Evaluation

ENW keeps its promise to offer coverage from ethnic and minority presses both large and small, scholarly and popular. Though a number of publications come from serials that ceased publishing several years ago, the magazines and newspapers are published by ethnic and minority presses. ENW provides extensive coverage on a wide variety of local, regional, national, and international topics from diverse perspectives.

As one would expect in a ProQuest product, ENW provides interoperability with Primo-both of which fall under the Clarivate umbrella. ENW is listed in the Central Discovery Index, although some caution should be taken when adding records to avoid overwhelming results not relevant to your audience. ENW has 569 publications that can be added to Primo for searching. This database is available as an electronic collection for activation to Primo, with full CDI indexing. It is still possible to toggle individual portfolios if any fine tuning is preferred. ENW also integrates with Canvas, making it possible for students to use resources without having to separately log in to ProQuest databases. Support for both students and library staff is available on any page by clicking the question mark at the bottom of the page.

ENW platform accessibility is covered in ProQuest’s platform VPAT released in February 2024 which includes evaluation to the WCAG 2.2 AA level. It is noted, however, that some PDFs of articles and scanned articles (images) may not be fully accessible. When an article is available via HTML, the articles are compliant.

ENW follows ProQuest’s boilerplate privacy policy. In their words, “Your data is yours. You own it, you control it.” Although this may sound encouraging, remember, ProQuest still collects search data through cookies, either through a user’s login, or via IP information. If you choose to amend your search history, there is a lengthy process that may dissuade users from redacting their individual searches. As is standard for ProQuest databases, COUNTER reports are available.

Relevant Links

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Databases That Help Students Meet the California Community Colleges’ Ethnic Studies Graduation Requirement and More | Council of Chief Librarians - California Community Colleges. Feb. 2023, https://cclibrarians.org/review/diversity-equity-and-inclusion-databases-help-students-meet-california-community-colleges