New eResources: CRKN and Social Science/Humanities Expansion
CRKN. It’s not a radio station! But it can be difficult to keep the acronym straight (even in the library world). CRKN stands for Canadian Research Knowledge Network and its former incarnation was CNSLP – the Canadian National Site License Project. In the early stages, CNSLP allowed universities across Canada to acquire consortially key electronic content through Wiley, Springer, Elsevier and others with the emphasis being on science content. The process to redress the balance between predominantly science content with more social science/humanities content began in earnest almost two years ago. Involving over 70 institutions across the country, it was a logistical masterpiece when it finally came together. And now the respective communities of all of those participating can benefit from the outcome.
Highlights of new content available to York University include:
History, geography, social sciences, fine arts, medicine, science and technology, language and literature, philosophy and religion, law.
Do you teach or do research in any of these disciplines? IF so, than you will probably want to take note of this important new acquisition.
ECCO is “a comprehensive digital edition of The Eighteenth Century, the world’s largest library of the printed book on microfilm, available through its imprint Primary Source Microfilm™. In the most ambitious single digitization project ever undertaken, nearly 150,000 English-language titles and editions published between 1701 and 1800 will be made available online over the course of the next two years.”
"This edition of Asian American Drama contains 252 plays by 42 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. Some 50% of these plays have never been published before. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays. “
“This edition of Black Drama contains approximately 1200 plays by 201 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays. “
“This edition of British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries includes the immediate experiences of approximately 500 women, as revealed in over 100,000 pages of diaries and letters. Particular care has been taken to index this material so that it can be searched more thoroughly than ever before.”
“Latino Literature contains approximately 380 plays and 67,500 pages of prose and poetry by Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican and other Latin writers working in the United States. Although the collection includes materials from the Nineteenth Century, the vast majority of the materials are from the Chicano Renaissance to the present. We present them in their original language, English or Spanish.
About 30% of the database is previously unpublished or rare materials from various sources including institutions such as the Centro de Estudios Puertorriquenos at Hunter College, scholars’ personal archives and the authors themselves."
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories includes 2,162 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information, so providing a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950.
“This second release of the North American Indian Biographical Database (IBIO) contains approximately 27,000 pages of text and images. Included are biographies, auto-biographies, personal narratives, speeches, diaries, letters, and oral histories. When complete IBIO will include 100,000 pages of text and images.”
North American Theatre Online is a comprehensive reference work covering all aspects of the Canadian and American Theatre.
It includes some 40,000 pages of major reference materials, together with records to more than 30,000 plays, over 57,000 people, 5,400 theatres, nearly 22,000 productions and 2,500 production companies. Each year we'll be adding more than 20,000 new
records to these files.The file also includes some 10,500 images, playbills, postcards, scrapbooks and other resources.
Women and Social Movements contains the following resources:
65 document projects that interpret and present documents, most of which are not otherwise available online. Each document project poses an interpretive question and provides a collection of documents that address the question.
Altogether these document projects provide more than 1,800 documents, approximately 740 images, and over 600 links to other websites.
Oral History Online is a landmark database of English language oral histories. It contains in-depth indexing to more than 2,700 collections from around the world, keyword searching of nearly 285,000 pages of full-text by close to 10,000 individuals, links to approximately 3,500 audio and video files, and almost 18,000 bibliographic records. The February 2006 release includes more than 70 new collections, many of which cover indigenous peoples such as the Inuit, Doig River
First Nation, and the Algonquin. These new collections also cover the following topics: the Kennedy Space Center, the occupation and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, and on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs in the Pacific Northwest in the USA.
