Tag: databases
Resource: Russian National Bibliography
The Library recently acquired access through EastView to the Russian National Bibliography.
Included in the resource are: the definitive reference guide available to Russian book publications; indices to Russian journals, periodicals, and newspapers; book reviews found in the central and regional Russian press; synopses of dissertations from the Russian Federation; an index to Russian music-related publications; and an index of visual materials published or appearing in books, collected works, and magazines.
All of these can be searched separately or together. Use the Keyword search box to enter the keywords for your search. To the right of the Keyword search box you can select whether you want to conduct your search in Russian, English, or Transliteration. One thing to note here — by using English keywords for your search, your search will be on English-language sources only. If you want to run a search in Russian, but do not have a Russian keyboard driver installed in your system, click “Russian Keyboard.” A small window will pop up with a Russian keyboard that will enter the text you type on it directly into Keyword search box.
Resource: International Bibliography of Humanism and the Renaissance
The Library recently acquired from Brepolis the International Bibliography of Humanism and the Renaissance, a multi-disciplinary bibliography of the Renaissance and the early modern period (1500-1700) that includes entries for monographs, critical editions, translations, anthologies, miscellanies and exhibition catalogs, as well as specialized dictionaries and encyclopedias, handbooks, journal articles and reviews written in any language and presented in any format.
It reproduces online and continues the Bibliographie internationale de l’Humanisme et de la Renaissance, coordinated and published by Librairie Droz since 1965 (and located in our collection in the MAIN (Gardner) Stacks at CB361.1 .B52). The rights to the resource were acquired by Brepolis in 2013.
According to the site, the “core of the Bibliography focuses on European history and culture that spans the 16th and 17th centuries, and encompasses a broad spectrum of subjects, ranging from religious history through to philosophy, science and the arts; and from military and political history through to social and gender studies. Both the geographical and the chronological delimitations are not restrictive as the IBHR also includes publications on the European interactions with the wider world through exploration, colonisation, slavery and the Christian mission and extends its coverage to the modern period with the inclusion of modern hermeneutics, reception studies and the 21st c. teaching of texts written in the target period.”1
Resource: Bibliographie de civilisation médiévale (BCM)
A new database acquired from Brepolis is the Bibliographie de civilisation médiévale (Bibliography of Medieval Civilisation) (BCM) which indexes monographs and miscellanies as well as book reviews. It complements and can be simultaneously searched with the International Medieval Bibliography (IMB).
BCM originated in the printed bibliography published in the Cahiers de civilisation médiévale between 1958 and 2009, Initially dedicated to the High Middle Ages, its scope has broadened to cover Late Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages (300-1500). Continued selection and indexing of sources for the BCM is carried out at the Centre d’Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale. Bibliographic entries reflect the language of the original work, but the indexing of subjects and locations is in English.
In addition to standard limiters such as publication date and language, the Advanced Search option allows you to narrow your search to an academic discpline, geographic area, and range of centuries. UC-eLinks is enabled to facilitate retrieval of subscribed online sources.
Resource: Slavic Humanities Index
The Slavic Humanities Index is a bibliographic database in the field of Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern European Studies that provides access to scholarly periodicals published in the region that until now had remained largely unindexed. It currently contains over 225,000+ bibliographic citations from around 220 periodicals in twenty-one languages. Most periodicals are indexed from around 1994 to the current issue, but some select publications are indexed back into the 1980s. In the future, significant periodicals will be indexed retrospectively to provide a more comprehensive research tool.
The resource includes publications from Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine and provides access to citations of articles, book reviews, and other materials across a wide range of disciplines.
The database can be searched using native alphabets or transliteration systems. See the search tips page for detailed instructions.
New Online Resources!
The Library has many new tools for research in areas
such as History, Native American Studies, International and Area Studies, Genetics, Gender and Women’s Studies, Design, Film and Media Studies, Environmental Studies, Engineering, Popular Culture, Music, Business, Agriculture, Literature, and more!
ProQuest Historical Newspapers
The Library recently added a number of important historical newspapers to our growing digital collection in the ProQuest Historical Newspapers package*.
The Times of India was originally founded in 1838 as The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce (1838-1859), it became the Bombay Times and Standard (1860-1861) after merging with two other popular newspapers. After another merger in 1861, it was renamed The Times of India (1861-present). Learn about the partition of India, the economic boom in the IT sector, Bollywood films or Sachin Tendulkar, one of the greatest batsmen of all time, in this rich primary resource.
The Los Angeles Sentinel (1934-2005) covers community and world issues from the unique cultural perspective of the Los Angeles African American community. Follow the grass-roots struggle against the racially restrictive housing covenants of the 1940s, or read Roy Wilkins’ column, “The Watchtower,” and see how he attacked efforts to label civil rights activists as “communists” during the Cold War.
The Guardian and The Observer cover over 200 years of British news (1791 -2003). The Guardian was first published in response to the Peterloo Massacre. Originally known as the Manchester Guardian, it was a Saturday-only paper until the newspaper stamp duty was repealed in 1855. The Observer, the world’s oldest Sunday paper, was first published in 1791. Thought-provoking writers such as George Orwell, Vita Sackville-West, Clive James, Philip Toynbee, and others were contributors, continuing a tradition of freedom of the press and providing serious coverage of politics and literature.
The Baltimore Afro-American (1893-1988) was founded by former slave John Henry Murphy, Sr. when he merged three church publications. The Baltimore Afro-American became one of the most widely circulated African-American newspapers on the Atlantic Coast, and included contributors such as writer Langston Hughes, intellectual J. Saunders Redding, artist Romare Bearden, and sports editor Sam Lacy, whose column influenced the desegregation of professional sports.
* This post is the fourth in a series highlighting important additions to our online resources. These purchases were made possible in large part with new library funding that resulted from the Commission on the Future of the UC Berkeley Library charged under EVCP George Breslauer and Chair, Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate, Elizabeth Deakin. For more information, read the Commission Report and Response.
Trial: Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginning to the Present
Until June 6, The Library has access to a trial of Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginning to the Present.
Tabs lead the user to a brief overview of an author, a list of writings, a brief life (with bibliography of sources), an overview of life/writing (each with bibliographies), a lengthy timeline of events in the author’s life, and links to mentions of the author in other parts of Orlando. The timelines are quite helpful as is the ability to search by occupation, place and genre. Most interesting, perhaps, is the tag search, which allows the user to combine many different aspects of authors’s lives to create a dataset. I recommend you look at the PDF guide, which provides simple instructions for accessing the many features of the database.
A review of Orlando in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature provides some background on the project and suggestions on how to best exploit its features. Excepts from additional reviews can be found on the Orlando site.
Please send your comments to Michaelyn Burnette.
(Miranda Hickman. “Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present (review).” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 27.1 (2008): 181-186. Project MUSE. Web. 13 May. 2014
E-books in French from Numerique Premium
A subsidiary of the publisher Nouveau Monde éditions, Numérique Premium is a leading provider of e-books in the humanities and social sciences. In partnership with more than 30 publishers in the French-speaking world, they currently offer about 1,000 ebooks. UC Berkeley has access to their entire collection through May 30. Please take a look and send your feedback to cpotts AT berkeley.edu.
Mas y mas Digitalia
In conjunction with a group of other UC libraries, the Library has begun a one-year trial to Digitalia’s complete package of e-books in the social sciences and humanities published in Spain and Latin America. This collection comprises more than 4,500 e-books and an impressive selection of current and historical journals. Representative journals, previously only available in print through UC Berkeley, include Al-Qantara, El viejo topo, La Nueva literatura hispaníca, Quimera, Orígenes, Revista de indias, Revista internacional de sociología, Siglo Diecinueve, Revista Iberoamericana de Lingüística, Hora de España and more.
The Library will have access to Digitalia through September 1, 2014 but please email cpotts AT library.berkeley.edu your requests for individual titles that you would like to see permanently acquired. Last year, the Library acquired 300 e-books and their records now appear in OskiCat.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO), parts 5-8
Last year, the California Digital Library negotiated the purchase of Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO), parts 1-4 for all ten UC campuses. Among other specialized archives such as one for photography, African colonialism and encounters between the East and the West, the first parts of NCCO include more than 6500 digitized books in French from the The Corvey Collection of European Literature, 1790-1840. UC Berkeley has trial access to parts 5-8 of NCCO through October 17 and we are currently seeking feedback. Please email cpotts AT berkeley.edu with your impressions of the second installment of this “ground-breaking resource” focused on digitized primary source collections of the long nineteenth century.