u/BigReaderBadGrades

I'm writing a long profile of an author's career. Newspapers.com has been a great help, but a friend of mine who works at a library showed me aome of the material he found on ProQuest, shared a dozen with me, and now I'm convinced theres a slew of material there that could help.

My local library doesnt have access, my Alma mater does, but only on-campus, which I can't reach.

Is there a research society or some other group I could buy into, for access? I've never gone through ProQuest firsthand, so if someone's got more experience with databases, and you could recommend a couple more-accessible resources that approximate the same results, that would be helpful too.

I'm reporting a story about Robert Caro's 50 years in the stacks, working on his LBJ biography. For the first 25ish years he was working on the book, Caro described the administration of the Johnson library as being "unremittingly hostile" to his project (he's careful to say the archivists themselves are wonderful), especially after the first volume came out in '82 and revealed he wasn't white washing anything.

The archive's administrative leadership turned over in 2003, so things are good now, but I'm hoping to learn more about that friction.

Having a bit of a ball going through newspaper archives, seeing how those first two volumes were received by readers and critics, and I'm also hoping to exploring how his research was complicated by the incremental dumps of declassified documents while he was there; huge swaths of text he'd have to suddenly wade through.

Thanks in advance for any pointers you can offer!