The Making of the Modern World

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    Overview

    The Making of the Modern World (MOMW) is a very large digital collection of over 60,000 works primarily on economics written in Europe and the United States. It is comprised of two parts: MOMW I (1450-1850), and MOMW II (1851-1914).

    Provider
    May 31, 2024 4:27pm
    Details
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    Collection Content

    The Making of the Modern World (MOMW) is a very large digital collection of over 60,000 works primarily on economics written in Europe and the United States. It is comprised of two parts: MOMW I (1450-1850), and MOMW II (1851-1914). MOMW I contains over 59000 monographs and over 460 serial titles, while MOMW II added 5000 more monographs and reports. The materials were digitized from a combined microform version of the Goldsmiths’ Library of Economic Literature at the University of London Library and the Kress Collection of Business and Economics at the Harvard Business School, along with a smaller selection of titles from the Seligman Collections (Columbia University and Hiroshima University), Yale University, and the University of Kansas.

    The collection includes monographs, political pamphlets, serials, government publications and ephemera. MOMW II broadens the content to include reports, speeches and surveys.  Most of the materials fall under the categories of theoretical and descriptive economics covering such topics as banking, finance, transportation and manufacturing. These works are written in 17 different Europeans languages, with an estimated 30% of the content of MOMW I, and 50% of MOMW II in non-English languages.

    MOMW is a valuable resource for research in economic, political, and legal history.  As an example of the depth of the collection, it appears to present the complete body of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, with over twenty editions spanning the period from 1776 to 1848 and translations into German, French, Italian and Spanish.

    The content could be applied to various inquiries including wealth, trade, labor, early industrialization and growth of technology, gender roles, and area studies.   In full text searches the terms yielding the most hits--around thirty thousand results each--include trade, war and rent. The collection also would be a valuable resource for colonial research, as it contains works about many former colonies including those from the Americas, Africa, India and the East Indies. MOMW II provides insights into the expansion of industrialization, as well as labor issues and fiscal crises.

    Concerning the question of overlap between this sizeable digital collection and other resources, Xiong’s review in In Xiong’s comparative review in The Charleston Advisor compared MOMW I with Google Books in 2010. Under a keyword search for “economics,” Google Books yielded only 889 titles published up to 1850 which are available in Google Books' Full View (vs. snippet), compared to 2265 in MOMW I. Furthermore, while there was overlap of authors and titles between the two digital collections, there was no duplication of the specific editions from MOMW I in Google Books, which may be surprising –except that Gale claims that its prestigious source libraries included many unique primary source items. Xiong acknowledged that metadata variations may have been a factor in the results. At the same time, Google Books has continued to add titles whereas MOMW is a fixed, albeit very large, collection.

    Delivery

    Metadata

    The database entries contain all of the basic categories one would normally expect including title, author, language and subject. The entries also include a MARC record number, MOMW release date and a generated source citation for the researcher.  MARC records themselves are available as a separate purchase.

    Technical platform & interface

    This description is based on an examination of the platform in 2011:

    The design of the interface is plain and efficient.  In addition to full text searches researchers can browse topics such as agriculture, population, slavery, and social conditions, or alphabetical author and title lists. Given the volume of material in the archive, most alphabetical listings contain hundreds of works. The materials would be easier to sift through with the addition of browse options by country, historical period, frequency of download and number of citations. At the same time, advanced searching incorporates Library of Congress subject headings, and allows narrowing by geographic subject.

    Researchers will find it simple to navigate through the linked table of contents and list of illustrations that accompanies each work. The collection displays one page of a work at a time in the form of an easy to resize and rotate jpeg image. A researcher may print up to 250 pages of each work at one time in PDF form.

    Aside from standard capabilities, the search engine has effective advanced features as well. Researchers are able to search text within works with ease. In advanced search researchers can limit their results to works with illustrations such as cartoons, charts, maps and genealogical tables. A fuzzy search function allows researchers to expand their results to include older spellings of words. Finally, the interface includes a search history to allow researchers to return to their previous results. One tool that would improve the user experience would be the ability to make annotations within the collection’s interface.

    Update 11/4/13

    The publisher will integrate this collection into their Gale Artemis: Primary Sources platform, offering advanced features first developed for the NCCO collections. Most Gale historical collections will eventually be available on the Artemis platform and thus cross searchable (if purchased). This collection will also retain its native platform and interface.

    Terms

    The collections are available for purchase.

    Strengths and Weaknesses

    Taken together, MOMW I and MOMW II represent very significant and extensive collections combining standard works in multiple editions and unique primary source materials. The interface is straightforward and easy to use, although it could benefit from having a greater variety of browse functions. As open access collections of public domain works (such as Google Books) continue to grow the monographs represented in MOMW may be more easily found elsewhere. But the ease of use may not necessarily be duplicated. Another benefit to the MOMW collections will be cross-collection searchability with other Gale collections, including ECCO and especially NCCO, since the publisher will be loading these collections on the ARTEMIS platform.

    Reviewers

    Center for Research Libraries

    • Virginia Kerr - Digital Program Manager
    • Ariel Marcus - Project Assistant

     

    Additional Reviews in Other Sources

    Jian Anna Xiong, "A Comparative Evaluation of the Making of the Modern World (MOMW) and Google Books (GB)," The Charleston Advisor April 2010, pp. 18-25. http://charleston.publisher.ingentaconnect.com/content/charleston/chadv… Accessed October 10, 2013

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