Database News, June - July 2006

• Black Women Writers Debuts
• MLA International Bibliography Archive
• New CSA, Gale Databases to Try Out

The Libraries now make available the Chronicle of Higher Education for the entire campus, without logins or password. Now you can browse the latest headlines on colleges and universities, view statistics on enrollments and budgets, scan the job ads, and more. Articles are available from 1989 to the present, with special issues on topics such as campus architecture, legal issues, or libraries. Browse charts and data on subjects as diverse as institutions producing the most Fulbright scholars or how to explain déjà vu. View facts and figures from the Chronicle Almanac back to 1995/96. It's an education in education!

Black Women Writers is the newest database from Alexander Street Press. When complete, Black Women Writers will offer more than 100,000 pages of poetry, prose, and essays by authors from more than 20 countries. The database currently contains 6,000 pages of works by authors such as Harriet Jacobs and Nikki Giovanni. Works are selected from several source bibliographies, including:

• Post Colonial African Writers. Ed. Pushpa Naidu Parekh & Siga Fatima Jagne. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1998.
• Twentieth-century Caribbean and Black African Writers. First series. Ed. Bernth Lindfors & Reinhard Sander. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1992.
• Twentieth-century Caribbean and Black African Writers. Second series. Ed. Bernth Lindfors & Reinhard Sander. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1993
• Twentieth-century Caribbean and Black African Writers. Third series. Ed. Bernth Lindfors & Reinhard Sander. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1996.
• A Century of Fiction by American Negroes, 1853-1952: A Descriptive Bibliography. Philadelphia: Albert Saifer Publisher, 1969.
• African American Writers: A Dictionary. Ed. Shari Dorantes Hatch & Michael Strickland. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2000.
• Bibliography of Women Writers from the Caribbean (1836-1986). By Brenda F. Berrian. Washington D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1989.
• Black American Feminisms. A Multidisciplinary Bibliography compiled by Sherri L. Barnes, Associate Librarian at University of California Santa Barbara. http://www.library.ucsb.edu/subjects/blackfeminism.

As with other Alexander Street databases, users may search by criteria such as keyword in text, author, title, time period, ethnicity or region of author, religion of author, and more.

The MLA International Bibliography, the comprehensive index to publications on language, literature, and folklore, has added the complete archive of older years to the database. This archive of more than 100,000 records covers 1926 to 1962 and represents the first 38 printed volumes of the bibliography. These older records allow researchers to find, for example, early articles on Faulkner from the Sewanee Review; Cleanth Brooks on New Criticism, or Delmore Scwartz on T.S. Eliot. Journal articles, book notices, and dissertations are indexed.

This month, try out databases as diverse as early printed Americana and up to the minute environmental science. The ARKLink consortium of college and university libraries in Arkansas have arranged several trials of new products. CSA has several new resources available, including Community of Scholars: Social Science a directory of 104,000 profiles of international scholars in the social sciences that provides biographical background and verified publication histories, contact information, links to personal website, CV, affiliations, personal statement of interest.

From Gale, users can test the complete Virtual Reference Library of several hundred dictionaries, encyclopedias, and directories in all subject areas, as well as the Sabin collection of early American imprints.

Visit our trials page for more information.