George: For what it's worth, my experience using EAN has been similar. Although it has been immensely useful in getting through hundreds of citations quickly, it misses items it clearly should include, as well as include lots of useless material. Unfortunately, for now, it's the best I've got, so I continue to use it and supplement it by slugging through the microfilm. 
   Good luck on your search. Charlie Foy
PS My article "Seeking Freedom in the Atlantic, 1713-1783" will be in the Spring issue of the Journal of Early American History (U of Penn Press)

-----Original Message-----
>From: George Thompson <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Feb 1, 2006 5:03 PM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: [NYHIST-L] Early American Periodicals database
>
>Have any of you tested the EAN database by searching for a known item?
>
>I have been, and have far too frequently been failing to find the item 
>under the significant words, although it is findable under 
>insignificant ones.
>
>For instance: New-York Evening Post ran the following ad on September 
>13, 1811 (p. 3, col. 3)
>AT DYDE'S MILITARY GROUNDS.  Up the Broadway, to-morrow afternoon, 
>Sept. 14.
>The game of English Trap Ball, will be played, full as amusing as 
>Crickets (sic) and the exercise not so violent.
>The Spring Gun will be in order to shoot.
>Three men will start to run three hundred yards in sacks, at 5 o?clock.
>No gambling will be allowed on the premises.
>
>I am interested in the prehistory of baseball, and so searched EAN 
>for "trap ball", but found nothing, not even this ad, which I had 
>previously turned up while reading the NYEPost.  Nor did the ad turn 
>up under English trap, Dyde's, or military.  Under dyde, spring gun 
>and crickets I found a similar, though not identical ad from Dyde in 
>the Columbian of September 13, 1811 (p. 3, col. 4), but I still 
>did not find the NYEPost's ad.  The ad in the Columbian did not appear 
>under trap ball either.  I wonder how many other appearances of the 
>words "trap ball" in the newspapers digitized for this project have 
>been missed; of at least two potential matches, the EAN database found 
>neither.  Note that the Evening Post has been digitized for that date, 
>and this ad is there, as I could confirm by searching  for "Evening 
>Post", date of Sept 13, 1811 -- which shows 180+ entries -- finding 
>one on p. 3, choosing the View This Page option, and then looking 
>where I knew it to be.   The reproduction seem perfectly legible. 
>
>I have 5 or 6 similar instances of interesting items from newspapers 
>of the 1760s and 1790s that I have been able to find in EAN, but only 
>by searching for an insignificant word, not by the word or name that 
>marks it as interesting.
>
>The EAN databse is nice for what it does, but how many $1000 a year 
>should libraries pay for a database that is as unreliable as EAN is?
>
>GAT
>
>George A. Thompson
>Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern 
>Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.