Internet Resources: April 2018 Edition

Selected reviews of digital reference resources from the April issue of Choice.

Posted on April 5, 2018 in Internet Resources

Archive of American Television, from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation.
emmytvlegends.org

[Revisited Jan’18] Created by the nonprofit Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Foundation, Archive of American Television focuses on interviews. The site makes available more than 850 videotaped interviews with television industry professionals who work in front of and behind the camera, chronicling the television industry from its earliest days to the present. Since 2008, the vast majority of the interviews have been digitized and made freely available to the public through the website, with briefer clips available on YouTube. Though the first interviews were taped in 1996, the range of time discussed by interviewees stretches from the time of the invention of television (1920s) to the present. New oral histories are produced every year, covering a variety of television professions, genres, and topics. Since 2009, when this website was first reviewed (CH, Mar’10, 47-3539), more than 200 interviews have been added. In addition to a transcript, each interview is accompanied by an overview of the interview content, the interview date, and the interviewer. Interviews may be viewed in clips, which makes it easier to find specific content within the entire interview. Though the website is busy graphically, with its television-related blog entries and news stories, searching for content is surprisingly easy. Interviews are browsable by person, individual show, genre, profession, and a mélange of topics. The searcher can also simply click on Interviews in the menu bar to get started. A keyword search function allows filtering by category and type of information (e.g., blog post, people, show, etc.). Though this resource is particularly important for film and television studies, it will be of interest in a variety of disciplines. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All users. —P. Mardeusz, University of Vermont

The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA), from the University of Texas at Austin.
ailla.utexas.org

While digital preservation has been applied to a diverse range of materials across the full range of scholarly disciplines, its value for primary linguistic data gathered by anthropologists in the form of audio and video field recordings is less known. A joint project of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies and the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin, the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) provides free access to a body of original historical linguistic data preserved digitally from original fragile formats such as magnetic tape. The website has been fully overhauled in 2017 according to director’s blog posting at liberalarts.utexas.edu/llilas/news/12373, and its updated Welcome section provides details on the mission, history, and collections of the archive. The contents, organized by language and the collectors’ names, are the products of specific language-preservation team projects or the work of individual ethnographers and linguistics researchers.

Users are required to register before being granted access to read and download the preserved files. Audio files are available in MP3 and WAV formats, with significant supporting PDF documentation. At the time of review, more than 46,000 digital files in more than 400 indigenous languages were accessible, according to information confirmed by the website’s developers. Users of the archive should be aware that the languages of northern Mexico are included as part of the site’s Mesoamerican designation. An earlier version of the Languages section provided a valuable overview of the complex linguistic families and isolated tongues present in Latin America, and one hopes that this information will be restored and augmented. The full text of papers based on AILLA collections presented from 2001 to 2013 and proceedings of conferences sponsored by the Center for the Indigenous Languages of Latin America up to 2013 are provided, along with 2016 and 2017 programs. The contents of the archive for which materials have been processed usefully complements Yale University’s Human Relations Area Files coverage of the Native American cultures of North America, Middle and Central America, and South America now available in its eHRAF World Cultures database (CH, Oct’15, 53-0580). Quite a large volume of materials remain to be processed and made available online in both projects, however. College and university libraries supporting undergraduate and graduate program in Latin American studies, anthropology, linguistics, and history will want to highlight this unique resource, and members of indigenous communities and educators engaged in language-revitalization efforts will find rare, primary-source materials preserved here for posterity. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-level undergraduates through professionals/practitioners. —R. B. Ridinger, Northern Illinois University

Counseling and Therapy in Video. Alexander Street, 2017. Contact publisher for pricing (based on FTE, purchase history, and Carnegie Classification).
search.alexanderstreet.com/ctiv

[Visited Jan’18] Alexander Street’s Counseling and Therapy in Video collection provides videos, lectures, books, and other documents that offer firsthand clinical vignettes and informational material about a wide variety of mental health issues. The product reviewed here consists of Counseling and Therapy in Video Classic and Counseling and Therapy in Video III, IV, and V. It comprises 1,832 videos, 352 segments, and 641 books and documents, totaling 1,437 hours and 47,097 pages of sessions, lectures, transcripts, and written text. The user can browse the collection by title, discipline, clinician, presenting condition, therapeutic approach, subject, publisher, and series. Once a category is selected, a much larger and more varied menu of options appears. For instance, selecting Therapeutic Approaches and then Anger Management brings up 15 results, including a video about anger and its roots and management; a series of videos depicting the assessment of a client with anger issues; and a video about evidence-based treatment planning for anger management. The user can also search the entire keyword and explore a given topic across a variety of media and through the voices of experts with a range of theoretical approaches. The collection presents some challenges in terms of coverage. For instance, in the Presenting Conditions category a search under E in the alphabetical menu yields only enuresis and encopresis, but not eating disorders, ennui, egocentrism, or other E terms. By contrast, the Therapeutic Approaches menu is quite comprehensive and includes not only approaches to therapy such as Adlerian counseling but also techniques such as the empty chair. These inconsistencies aside, this is a useful tool for counseling, psychology, and social work. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty, professionals. —S. W. French, Illinois State University

Ebook Central. ProQuest, 2017. Contact publisher for pricing.
proquest.com

[Visited Jan’18] Ebook Central represents the merger of ProQuest’s EBL—Ebook Library (CH, Jun’07, 44-5355) and ebrary (CH, Nov’05, 43-1275, CH, Jul’10, 47-5974), two electronic book aggregators. The upshot is an enormous database comprising close to one million titles and encompassing more than 750 publishers. ProQuest claims that approximately 100,000 titles will be added each year, a far-reaching goal considering the severe competition in the academic ebook market from heavyweights such as Oxford, Cambridge, Jstor, Project Muse, and the like. It will be interesting to see if these distinguished academic presses will continue to proffer titles to Ebook Central on the same scale as in the past. The merger extended to a wholesale revamping of the interface and platform, and ProQuest clearly invested a considerable sum in back-end work on Ebook Central.

Using the single search box on the homepage is chancy, given the potential million volumes in play. Fortunately, there are numerous advanced search options and a browse function. The latter offers 11 principal disciplinary categories, ranging from the Arts to Science and Technology, which in turn are divided into 54 subcategories. Advanced search is more helpful. Here one finds the typical author, title, and ISBN search boxes but also LC subject heading and call number limiters, along with date and language filters—tools that allow for a very precise search. The records of the individual titles are well articulated. The right column of the page displays precise bibliographic information that one would expect from an OPAC. At the head of the table of contents is a valuable description or overview of the work, followed by a segmented chapter-by-chapter view of the work. Individual chapters are readily downloadable. Entire books are also downloadable—for a maximum of 21 days—but this requires installation of a proprietary version of Adobe.

There are numerous purchase options: subscription, patron-driven acquisition, and perpetual access. The subscription model furnishes access to more than 150,000 titles with no limit on simultaneous logons. The patron-driven model offers by far the most expansive catalog of titles and delivers a level of currency not available via subscription. Titles selected fall into the perpetual access model, which can be expanded so as to support multiple users—for an extra charge, of course. The administrative dashboard, which is much more sophisticated than those on comparable products, allows the administrator a great deal of leeway in configuring a selection for a local collection. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. —J. Millhorn, Northern Illinois University

HathiTrust Digital Library.
hathitrust.org

[Revisited Jan’18] HathiTrust Digital Library (HTDL) is a joint catalog of more than 120 partners, including universities, colleges, research institutions, and several consortia of libraries. When this reviewer visited there were 15,968,975 digitized volumes (7,831,200 books, 432,196 serials, 5,589,141,250 pages) taking up 716 terabytes. About 37 percent (5,976,440) of these volumes are in the public domain, and others are accessible to members of partner institutions. There are 3,167 private and public (including permanent and member-created) collections in HTDL. Sources for the content include Google, Internet Archive, Microsoft, and partner initiatives ensuring long-term preservation and access. The easy-to-use interface offers useful search tips and invites visitors to browse the collections, search (using either basic or advanced capabilities), and read books online as well as via mobile devices. Users can search entire texts and metadata records with advanced features allowing full-text and catalog searching with multiple criteria including years of publication, language, and original format. The site offers FAQs and a feedback tab.

Affiliates of partner institutions and guests can log in to access specific features, e.g., creating, saving, and sharing collections. The site also allows logins via popular social media accounts or a guest-created University of Michigan Friend account. Having an account enables visitors to organize their favorites into collections and save and share those collections with others on the web. Guests are limited to download pages only; affiliated members can download public domain works with restrictions. Copyrighted works are protected. HTDL is available for use by the general public, academics, digital humanists, and teachers and students in K–12 school systems. Although most volumes represent the humanities, many others support research and public interest in science heritage, government documents, and genealogy mostly related to the US. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All users. —A. Sabharwal, University of Toledo

Literary Print Culture: The Stationers’ Company Archive, 1554–2007. Adam Matthew, 2017. Pricing based on FTE, purchase history, and Carnegie Classification; a typical one-time purchase with nominal hosting fee (0.5% of purchase price) ranges from $12,000.00 to $40,000.00.
amdigital.co.uk/primary-sources/literary-print-culture

[Visited Jan’18] In partnership with Adam Matthew, London’s Stationers’ Company has made digitally available more than 400 years of its archival records, which are of indisputable value to the study of European print history, particularly the history of copyright. The contents of this commercial database include the Stationers’ Company’s financial, constitutional, and membership records dating back to the 16th century, along with photographs and oral histories from the 20th century. Users can browse the database contents by record types; somewhat confusingly, however, these categories often overlap with the filters for Document Type (charter, financial record, legal record, map, memorandum, oral history, photograph, etc.) and Theme (bookselling, company finance, copyright, membership, printing, etc.). In list view, records can be sorted by date, or alphabetically by title or series.

Highlights of the collections include the registries—some original and some in transcription—of “entries of copies” from 1554 through 1842: these records list the names of Stationers’ Company members along with their rights to print particular texts. Another highlight is the membership records from 1555 through 1940, including livery lists and apprentice memorandum books, which allow for biographical research on printers and publishers and their associations with one another. Document metadata is searchable, as is the full text of digitized printed documents, but this seems not to be the case for manuscript records, which are generally furnished without transcriptions. However, many of the longer print and manuscript documents feature a contents list with links for easier navigation, and some feature linked lists of “significant entries” (e.g., entries related to the printing of works by Shakespeare and Marlowe). Users can view thumbnails or full-size images, zoom in and out, and download copies of entire documents, individual pages, or specified page ranges as PDF files.

Additional features of the database include an interactive chronology of the Stationers’ Company, a glossary of terms, and a handful of essays by experts on the company and its records. But this database’s major contribution to scholarship is simply providing archival material digitally and remotely, and full-text searchability of most records. The database will be indispensable for those interested in English history and the history of the book in Europe. It has the potential to be a useful tool to incorporate primary sources in the classroom, though nonspecialists would need considerable guidance—and possibly even some basic paleography training—in order to understand these primary sources in context. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. —J. L. Newman, Hunter College, City University of New York

Patient Care and Health Information–Mayo Clinic.
mayoclinic.org/patient-care-and-health-information

[Visited Jan’18] US consumers’ right to participate in their own health care was established as early as 1905, when a court ruled against a surgeon (the defendant) and for the patient in Mohr v. Williams. (Though the operation in this lawsuit was successful, during the course of the surgery the physician changed his mind about which ear was most in need of surgery.) In recent decades consumer participation has been strengthened by grants to public libraries for consumer health materials, laws such as the Patient Self-Determination Act, and the National Library of Medicine’s outreach programs for consumer health. The Mayo Clinic’s Patient Care and Health Informationpages enables A-Z searches in four areas: diseases and conditions, symptoms, tests and procedures, and drugs and supplements. The entries are easy to read and understandable. Some, but not all, of the entries under diseases and conditions include relevant videos. Basic questions to ask a physician will prove helpful, as will links to clinical trials (though these are limited to those at the Mayo Clinic). The site also provides links to information about healthy lifestyle, making appointments, and so on. Although the The National Library of Medicine website (CH, Jul’14, 51-6204) is more robust—offering information classified under the headings of Summary, Resources, Genetics, Clinical Trials.gov, and Journal Articles—the Mayo Clinic’s Patient Care and Health Information remains a good starting point for consumers with health questions. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. —J. A. Ohles, Moravian College

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