JSTOR is the premier scholarly journal database. It is a full-text, interdisciplinary archive of only the most highly respected journal titles. By comparison, ABC-CLIO’s two scholarly databases — America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts— seem to be less frequently used, even by historians. There are several reasons for this, but perhaps the most important is that JSTOR provides direct access to the full-text, full-page image of all articles in the database. Consider, however, the following advantages of the ABC-CLIO databases:

1) America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts between them index over a thousand scholarly journals, including 65 of the 72 history titles available in JSTOR. A researcher using the ABC-CLIO databases will thus find nearly all citations to JSTOR articles and thousands of additional citations not available in JSTOR.

2) The Libraries’ new TUlink service enables two- or three-click access to the full-text of thousands of articles indexed by America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts. This means that JSTOR’s previous “full-text advantage,” described above, no longer holds.

3) Citations to articles in America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts contain human-generated subject headings; JSTOR’s article citations do not. Why does this make a difference? A researcher using the ABC-CLIO databases could perform a subject search for “Gates, Horatio,” easily finding all 34 citations to articles about the Revolutionary War general. This type of search simply cannot be done in JSTOR.

4) JCR Online assesses the impact of scholarly journals on various academic disciplines. The higher a journal’s “impact factor” the more important that journal is within its discipline. Between them, the two ABC-CLIO databases index all sixteen journals identified by JCR Online as having the highest impact factors in History. These journals are: Environmental History, American Historical Review,Journal of American History, Journal of Modern History, Social Science History,Past & Present, Journal of African History, Comparative Studies in Society & History, Journal of Social History, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, History Workshop Journal, International Review of Social History, Ethnohistory, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Zeitgeschichte, and Mouvement Social. JSTOR indexes only twelve of these same sixteen “high impact” history journals.

It certainly is not my objective to sour anyone on the use of JSTOR, which by any measure is a stellar scholarly resource. The point of this post is rather to say that both databases have much to recommend them. The choice of which to use ultimately depends upon the individual needs and preferences of the researcher. A comprehensive history article search will likely require the use of both.

Do you have a favorite history database?

—David C. Murray

Has any human achievement topped the invention of writing? Without it History, defined as “all that is remembered of the past as preserved in writing,” couldn’t exist. And neither could libraries. As Margaret Atwood states in the first episode of the Writing Code, a new 3-part series about the evolution of writing now airing on WHYY: “Writing is a code. It is the making of marks. You then have to understand that these marks can be retranslated into speech.” Uniquely among the many different systems of visual signification, writing captures spoken language. Writing appears to have evolved independently in as many as five locations around the world: Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, China, and Mesoamerica. Early writing served several functions. Among the Sumerians writing developed as an accurate method of keeping accounts; for the Maya its primary purpose was to aggrandize the institution of kingship. No matter what its purpose, writing transformed every society that it touched. The following books tell the story of how three of the world’s earliest writing systems — Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphics, as well as Sumerian cuneiform — were deciphered by modern scholars.

Breaking the Maya Code by Michael D. Coe, c1992
The Invention of Cuneiform: Writing in Sumer by Jean-Jacque Glassner, c2003
The Story of Writing by Andrew Robinson, c1995

The next time you find yourself struggling through 200 pages of assigned reading for an Anthro, History, Poly Sci, Psych, or other college course, remember those long-ago geniuses who invented writing, without whom none of it would be possible!

—David C. Murray

Three new library books take a critical look at the 60-year history of the CIA:

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (c2007) by New York Times reporter Tim Wiener. Listen to the author discuss his book (Real Player required).

In Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (c2006), Chalmers Johnsonargues for the disbandment of the CIA: “I believe we will never again know peace, nor in all probability survive very long as a nation, unless we abolish the CIA, restore intelligence collecting to the State Department, and remove all but purely military functions from the Pentagon” (21). Can the American Republic survive “clandestine operations” abroad; the creation of a “private army” answerable only to the president; or the secrecy engendered by “a government within a government”? Nemesis is the third book in a trilogy that also includesBlowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (c2000) and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (c2004).

David Barrett, a political scientist at Villanova University, is the author of The CIA & Congress: The Untold Story From Truman To Kennedy (c2005). Barrett examined recently declassified CIA documents, the so-called 700-page “family jewels,” linking the agency to the attempted assassination of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and others. Listen to Barrett discuss his findings (Real Player required).

The Federation of American Scientists has made available online the CIA’s ownFactbook on Intelligence. Two Temple databases offer declassified CIA documents: Declassified Documents Reference System (DDRS) and Digital National Security Archive. More CIA history? Click United States. Central Intelligence Agency — History, or explore the Force & Diplomacy subject guide.

—David C. Murray

We’ve set up a trial to a rather unusual history database called Footnote.com. Originally marketed to genealogists, Footnote.com has only recently come to the attention of research libraries. Institutions supporting serious history research and scholarship are taking an interest in Footnote.com because of a unique partnership with NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration. According to a NARA promotional document created in early February, “The National Archives and Footnote.com are working as partners to bring unprecedented access to selections of the vast holdings of the National Archives.” Highlights include Papers of the Continental Congress (1774-89), the Matthew B. Brady Collection of Civil War Photographs, and the Investigative Case Files of the Bureau of Investigation, 1908-1922. More recently added according to the Footnote.com website are records of the Constitutional Convention. The technology for displaying images is really slick: zoom way in on a document, rotate it, even add your own comments and annotations. The last “feature” is perhaps not ideal for serious scholars as it tends to clutter the screen. At least the annotations can be turned off.

One caveat with this database is that the NARA material is interspersed with documents uploaded by genealogists, amateur researchers, and individual subscribers. Granted, individuals often have nice things to share. However, it’s incongruous to give local and family history documents the same weight as primary-source NARA material. Clearly the developers of this database are striving, in a Web 2.0 sort of way, to be as inclusive and interactive as possible. Please have a look at this database and let me know what you think in the comments or via email.

—David C. Murray