History News has for the last several years been a sub-category of the main Temple University Libraries News blog. As of this semester Temple Library History News is its own distinct blog. What’s the difference? Not a whole lot beyond a more up-to-date interface. There is, however, a new URL and a new RSS feed.

The two ABC-CLIO databases, America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts, are now available on the familiar EBSCOhost platform. Advantages of having these core history databases on Ebsco include multiple database searching; easy linking to full-text databases such as JSTOR; personalized folders, a part of My EBSCOhost, for those who choose to create personalized accounts; the Historical Period Limiter, a way to find articles that discuss an event or events that occurred within a specific time frame; and a new cited reference search encompassing both databases. This last feature can be used in conjunction with Web of Science to more accurately gauge the importance to the field of history of any refereed journal article. —David C. Murray

A Temple News reporter recently asked me about underutilized library resources. She wanted to know which resources, if more widely known, would have the greatest positive impact on students’ research. At first I thought about JSTOR,Periodicals Archive Online, and other high-profile journal databases. After some additional thought I began to realize that another category of resources receives far too little attention in today’s research environment. I’m talking about general reference material — scholarly encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, statistical sources, and bibliographies. After all, finding reliable background information — a primary purpose of reference works — is absolutely critical to good research. Temple subscribes to several databases that provide digital versions of traditional encyclopedias and other reference sources. Among these databases are ABC-CLIO eBooks, Cambridge Companions, Credo Reference (formerly xreferplus), Gale Virtual Reference Library, netLibrary Reference Center, Oxford Reference Online, Reference Universe, and Sage eReference.

For history researchers, each of these databases has something to offer. Here I will highlight the Gale Virtual Reference Library, a database that provides full-text access to twenty history reference works, including these four noteworthy titles:

Encyclopaedia Judaica: Provides an exhaustive and organized overview of Jewish life and knowledge from the Second Temple period to the contemporary State of Israel, from Rabbinic to modern Yiddish literature, from Kabbalah to Americana and from Zionism to the contribution of Jews to world cultures, Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition is important to scholars, general readers and students.

Encyclopedia of European Social History: This six-volume reference includes more than 230 articles, ranging from 5,000 to 10,000 words, on everything from serfdom and the economy, to witchcraft and public health.

Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa: The set covers the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa, with major sections on Colonialism and Imperialism, the World Wars, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the United Nations involvement in the region. Each country in the region is reviewed, detailing its population, economy and government.

New Dictionary of the History of Ideas: A six-volume survey of the history of Western thought and culture, presented through 700 alphabetically arranged entries. Each entry explores the origin, cultural interpretations, and historical themes of such subjects as beauty, love, feminism, diversity, and social capital, among many others.

—David C. Murray

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