I recently downloaded a list all Davis Enterprise Newsbank and Enterprise web archive page index items containing the word "Lofland." Each index produced the same list and the same total number, which was 64. I then compared that list to my own lists of by-lined news items I have published in the Enterprise or stories in which the word Lofland has appeared.

That is a total of 90 items over the ten years of the index  from its start in August, 1997 and my search in August, 2007.

Of the 90, the Enterprise had indexed 64, which is 71% of the total.

I was the author or co-author of 16 of the 90 items. The Enterprise indexes included only one of them--6% of the total.

The detailed lists from which I made these calculations are reproduced as pdf files on this site at:

http://groups.dcn.org/dhrg/places-private-collections/the-davis-enterprise/enterprise-archiving-indexing-of-its-own-contents/research-note-on-the-completeness-of-enterprise-online-indexing-archiving/

Puzzled by this "short-fall" I asked the Enterprise editor if I was searching correctly. She responded that, indeed, "for many years, the online archive included only three or four local news stories a day . . . ." Therefore, each index was incomplete. (Her email is also reproduced on this site at the URL given just above.)

This short-fall in coverage means that Davis history researchers cannot use the Enterprise web site online index or the Newsbank archives/indexes as accurate ways to know if something was covered by the paper or not or to count the frequency of any matter over time.