Temple University Libraries recently acquired Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports, 1974-1996, an important new digital archive of full-text translations of foreign news sources from all areas of the world. FBIS will be of particular interest to anyone studying the Cold War and other major events of the last three decades of the 20th century. Currently Temple has complete online access to the parts of the database published by Readex to date, namely Parts 1 and 2, and which include material from the Middle East/Near East, South Asia, and Africa. Additional material from China (Part 3), Latin America (Part 5), and the former Soviet Union (Part 7) are scheduled to be released between summer 2008 and summer 2009.
Because FBIS contains historical content (1974-1996), it complements rather than competes with NewsBank’s Access World News / AWN (1996 to date), and Dialog’s World News Connection / WNC (1995 to date), two Temple databases that already provide access to foreign news sources in translation. FBIS dovetails nicely with DNSA and DDRS, two primary-source databases covering the same historical era. FBIS also complements AccessUN, yet another historical Readex database now available to Temple affiliates. AccessUN is a commercially published index to United Nations documents and publications. It includes resolutions, treaties, and UN periodicals and covers the years 1945 to date.
For more information and links to all of the above databases, please see the History Libguide. Contact me with questions or concerns.