Internet Resources: April 2021 Edition

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

Posted on April 1, 2021 in Internet Resources

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Calgary Herald Archive. ProQuest, 2021. Contact publisher for pricing.
https://go.proquest.com/AlbertaHistoricalNewspapers/

“The Calgary Herald Archive (CHA) is a primary resource that makes accessible the full text of this newspaper from its founding in 1883 to 2010,” wrote Jane C. Duffy for ccAdvisor. The resource, which is freely available to residents of Alberta, Canada, was made possible by a special collaboration between ProQuest and the province’s academic and public libraries. CHA is primarily intended for “citizens of Western Canada and researchers [of] Alberta’s social, political, and cultural history,” as it “captur[es] unique … regional information about Alberta’s largest city,” Duffy wrote. 

With an interface similar to other ProQuest products, CHA makes all content “browsable and searchable through a linked suite of access points … such as subject, key word, article title, author, date, wildcards and truncation,” in addition to “advanced search aids such as field codes, source type, document type, and language.” Duffy notes that “the ability to limit searches to documents that contain words in [Indigenous] languages” will be “of special interest to Indigenous researchers,” as it “supports new and emerging streams of research in Native culture, decolonialization and reconciliation studies, and other streams of Indigenous inquiry.” Moreover, “CHA is fully ADA-compliant and meets the most recent versions of WCAG,” and the streamlined search page “advances the researcher’s ability to find precise and relevant information with a minimum of scrolling or flipping back and forth from link to link.”

As Duffy concluded, “CHA is a highly specialized, stand-alone database that will be of interest almost exclusively to those who are already familiar with Albertan and other western Canadian history,” adding that “there is no comparable database that captures and controls within one tool the full content of CHA.” Summing Up: Essential. General readers through faculty.

This review is a summary of a longer review by Jane C. Duffy, MacEwan University, originally published in ccAdvisor.org. Copyright © 2021 by The Charleston Company.—Abstracted from, ccAdvisor

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Catholic News Archive. Catholic Research Resources Alliance (CRRA), 2020. Contact publisher for pricing.
https://thecatholicnewsarchive.org/

“The Catholic News Archive (CNA) is a freely available, unique digital collection of American Catholic newspapers,” which is “an overlooked and underrepresented content area,” wrote Sharon Kabel for ccAdvisor. At present, the database incorporates 17 newspapers that “cover both national (The Catholic Worker) and regional/local (The Voice) news” with broad coverage ranging from October 1831 to December 2016. Kabel added that “each title has its own page, with a brief biography of the newspaper and the issues available on the site.”

CNA offers users a clean interface and several options to browse content, such as by date, tag, diocese, and title, in addition to advanced features like wildcard and proximity searching—two powerful tools to counterbalance uncorrected optimal character recognition (OCR). As Kabel noted, “under the advanced search options, users can choose when, in what field, and in what newspaper to search and customize viewing their results.” Further, “once a user selects a result, the site makes skimming the article in question easy, with search terms and the article itself highlighted.” However, one prominent drawback that Kabel pinpointed is the lack of ways to export results, which is especially unhelpful for researchers. Although “users can save results to a private list … search terms and filters that typically appear in each result will disappear.”

Nevertheless, Kabel concluded that “CNA is a powerful, freely available tool with wide usefulness” for “students of history, religion, theology, philosophy, education, liturgy, and more.” Its importance is underscored by the fact that “Catholic newspapers are chronically underrepresented in newspaper collections,” which is also why “in terms of topic, scope, breadth, and access, there is no product comparable to CNA.” Summing Up: Essential. General readers through faculty.

This review is a summary of a longer review by Sharon Kabel, an independent researcher, originally published in ccAdvisor.org. Copyright © 2021 by The Charleston Company.—Abstracted from, ccAdvisor

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