Resources: CRL Reviews
CRL gathers and provides information here about commercial and open access digital resources of interest to the CRL community. This information is intended to inform library decisions on investment in electronic resources and related services.
Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports
Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports, 1941-1974 and 1974-1996, and the Daily Report Annexes, 1974-1996, released by Readex (a division of NewsBank) in 2007, is an electronic collection of the daily reports originally issued by the FBIS in paper and microform. The reports include selected news bulletins and editorials, speeches, briefings, interviews, and policy papers gleaned from radio and television broadcasts and news services in approximately 100 countries throughout the world. Collected and translated into English by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the texts are largely from sources in regions of American strategic interest during the period.
FBIS Daily Reports are also a complement to and cross...
African American Newspapers, 1827-1998
This digital collection from Readex provides access to approximately 270 U.S. newspapers published by and/or for African Americans from the mid-1800s to the late 1990s. Based on James P. Danky’s African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography, this collection, completed in 2011, documents cultural events and activities of interest to African-American communities of the period.
World Biographical Information System (WBIS) Online
The microfiche edition of K. G. Saur's Biographical Archives has been digitized and issued as a group of databases known as the World Biographical Information System (WBIS) Online. Reference works including biographical lexicons, encyclopedias, and monographs dating from the 16th century through the 1990s are the sources of biographical entries and articles on more than five million people from various countries from the 4th millennium B.C. to the late 20th century.
The Current Digest of the Chinese Press
Like its older sibling, Current Digest of the Russian Press, this weekly serial publication launched early in 2012 (after a pilot issue in August 2011) provides English translations of timely articles selected from domestic Chinese news publications. The digital archive from East View contains 373 issues dating from 2011 to the present.
East View reports that the archive will grow with ongoing subscription and is hosted on East View's Universal Database platform.
O Acervo Estadão (O Estado de S. Paulo digital archive)
First published on January 4, 1875, O Estado de S. Paulo is one of the major daily newspapers of Brazil.
On May 23, 2012, the newspaper announced the digitization of its entire collection, accessible through the portal O Acervo Estadão (http://acervo.estadao.com.br/). The archival content is accessible to current subscribers of print or digital versions of O Estado de S. Paulo. Nonsubscribers may access limited portions of content after registration.
LandScan
LandScan is a unique data set showing population distribution, developed by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). In 2011, East View obtained an exclusive license for all distribution of this database outside of internal government uses. The data set is available through a subscription for each year (representing data collected in the previous year). East View also offers The LandScan Global Archive, a compilation of the historical LandScan data sets.
Classic Mexican Cinema
Classic Mexican Cinema is a small, specialized digital collection of around 40,000 pages issued as one of the Brill Primary Sources collections. The five periodicals featured are from the Archives of the Filmoteca of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). In addition to periodicals the collection includes the personal scrapbook of filmmaker Fernando de Fuentes, as well as 50 rare lobby cards.
Érudit
Érudit is a publishing platform for scholarly and cultural journals, books, proceedings, theses, documents, and data developed by a nonprofit Canadian publishing consortium founded in 1998. Archival runs of journal publications published prior to a moving wall of current content are available through open access, while the remainder is available through subscription.
The Churchill Archive
Bloomsbury Publishing launched a digital version of the Winston Churchill archives in October, 2012. The archive is held in the Churchill Archives Centre (CAC) at Churchill College, in Cambridge.
HeinOnline
HeinOnline, the online platform of legal publisher William S. Hein & Co. Inc., consists of a set of collections that provide access to digital facsimiles of a wide range of printed primary sources on the history of Anglo-American law. The content and interface of HeinOnline are reviewed here; its value for use in historical research is compared to other databases in a CRL topic guide.
LLMC-Digital
LLMC-Digital, the online platform of the nonprofit Law Library Microform Consortium, makes a wide range of legal and governmental publications available online for the use of the academic community. The content and interface of LLMC-Digital are reviewed here; its value for use in historical research is compared to other databases in a CRL topic guide.
Statista
The Statista database portal, maintained by the Hamburg, Germany-based Statista Inc., provides current statistical data and comparisons for an eclectic, wide-ranging, and continually updated array of topics, using both publicly accessible and proprietary sources. The open access portion of the database provides access to about 10 percent of the overall database content.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO)
Gale Cengage has designed Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO) to be an extensive database with multiple content types, covering most regions of the world. The collection is in a rolling release of twelve modules over several years, with the initial four collection modules (called “Archives” by Gale) released in spring 2012.
MEMO 1: Pioneer Orientalists
The Dutch publisher Brill has released a database of high-resolution color scans of Middle Eastern manuscripts collected by early Orientalist scholars from Leiden, held in the research collection at Leiden University Library. This database is referred to in full as Middle Eastern Manuscripts Online 1 (MEMO 1): Pioneer Orientalists, the Manuscript Collections of Scaliger, Raphelengius and Golius from the Leiden University Library.
EUREKA.CC
The EUREKA.CC database provides access to more than 2,500 news and current event sources from North America, Latin America, and Europe. These sources range from large newspapers, such as Le Monde and Le Figaro, to small regional newspapers, as well as other formats such as newswires, specialized periodicals, and radio and television transcripts. A subscription includes all of the titles as a group, with pricing levels based on the number of simultaneous users.
Shen Bao newspaper (1872–1949)
The full run (1872–1949) of the Shanghai-based newspaper Shen Bao has been released in electronic format by Green Apple Data Center in China. It is distributed in North America by East View Information Services.
The Historical Jerusalem Post
Back issues of The Jerusalem Post from 1932 to 1988 (including its earlier title The Palestine Post) are being made available from ProQuest through its Historical Newspapers database platform.
Parker Library on the Web
This significant collection of medieval manuscripts accumulated by Archbishop Matthew Parker and housed in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, has been digitized in a joint project between the College, Cambridge University, and Stanford University, completed in 2009. The database is maintained by Stanford and distributed exclusively through Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co.
The First World War: Personal Experiences
The First World War: Personal Experiences allows researchers to explore the individual accounts, trench literature, and images of war collected from the citizens, soldiers, and military leaders serving on various sides in World War I.
State Papers Online
State Papers Online is a comprehensive collection of primary source British documents. Four modules covering 1509 to 1714, the period of the Tudor and Stuart monarchies, have already been completed; a new collection for the 18th century (covering 1714 to 1782) will be released in three modules, beginning in summer 2013. This wealth of digitized documents includes manuscript correspondence, reports, Parliamentary drafts, and depositions on domestic and foreign affairs.
The latest part is: State Papers Online: Eighteenth Century, 1714-1782: Part II: State Papers Foreign - Low Countries and Germany
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While CRL makes every effort to verify statements made herein, the opinions expressed and evaluative information provided here represent the considered viewpoints of individual librarians and specialists at CRL and in the CRL community. They do not necessarily reflect the views of CRL management, its board, and/or its officers.