Searching Pictures in Lexis-Nexis?

Doesn't seem possible does it? Since there are hardly any images in Lexis-Nexis Academic documents. All true, but when an image is included in an article it is tagged with metadata that is maintained and can be searched on. As Jennifer Matheny explains in a Lexis-Nexis Wiki post a couple months back:

Are you curious to see how many newspapers re-ran an Annie Liebovitz photo on a particular day? Do you want to know how many Getty Images are used by newspapers this month? Use the GRAPHIC section in your search!

On the Power Search form, select a publication or a group file. Then, the Add Section search should pop up. Select "GRAPHIC" from the drop-down box. Type in your term and click the blue Add to Search button.

Of course you still can't view the pictures but sometimes all you want are counts, pictures of Palin versus pictures of Biden, for instance, or such search results provide an interim step for locating pictures elsewhere--on microfilm or electronic files that offer page facsimiles.

Factiva now includes multimedia

You now have another option in addition to the Vanderbilt News Archive and AP Photo Archive for your audiovisual research needs: Factiva, goldmine of newspapers and business/media industry publications, has gone multimedia. Click on the Search 2.0 interface and perform any search and you'll see that the results screen now includes a multimedia link (in addition to pictures, web news and the regular newspapers, magazines, and newswire links). The extent of Factiva's video holdings is not entirely clear but the emphasis is, of course, on business and finance. From the "What's new" section of the the site:

"The new fully searchable audio and video content collection is oriented to news and business information, rather than user-generated content, and allows you to view relevant results via the Multimedia results tab. It includes: continuously updating content collection that will grow quickly to include more than 4,000 multimedia news and business sources and more than 300,000+ individual episodes, charts and graphs and a 90-day archive from leading publishers such as Dow Jones, NPR and the BBC."

The "90-day archive" signals a rather significant historical limitation. Something to keep in mind. Tooling around I found audio and video from Sunday news shows, the major US networks, Slate, YouTube, and sports talk radio. This is great but a little frustrating because there's no multimedia source list in sight which is what I'd really like to see.

The search engine uses speech-to-text technology to make it possible to search the text of programs. It neatly highlights your search terms and allows you to jump to that place in the program.

As for pictures, if you don't want to be limited to the Associated Press (AP Photo Archive) you can turn to Factiva which includes newswire photos from Reuters, McClatchy (formerly Knight-Ridder) and other international newswires.