Internet Resources: February 2022 Edition

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

Posted on February 3, 2022 in Internet Resources

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Declassified Documents Online: Twentieth-Century British Intelligence: An Intelligence Empire. Gale, part of Cengage Learning, 2021. Contact publisher for pricing.
https://www.gale.com/c/declassified-documents-online-twentieth-century-british-intelligence-intelligence-empire

Declassified Documents Online: Twentieth-Century British Intelligence: An Intelligence Empire “provides over 500,000 pages of declassified UK government documents on activities pertinent to British intelligence, decolonization, and security policies from 1905 to 2002,” wrote Donna B. Smith for ccAdvisor. “Sourced from five government departments,” including the UK Ministry of Defence, the Cabinet Office, the Colonial Office, MI5 (the Security Service), and the Special Operations Executive, “these unique primary source materials support research in 20th-century history, politics, and international relations by highlighting British operations in a time of global conflicts and shifting alliances,” Smith added. Focusing mainly on the period from WW II to the late 1980s, “[t]opics range from specific events, such as the SOE Operation ‘Jedburgh’ in Europe, to policy issues during the Cold War … with considerable emphasis on activities in Europe, India, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.”

“The various department collections are well organized and diligently indexed,” with “a variety of means by which to explore the documents,” Smith contended. These include the “single search box prominently located on the top portion of the page,” browsing via the five UK departments, or advanced searching by title, subject, or document number. “Results can [then] be analyzed using Topic Finder and Term Frequency tools,” Smith noted. 

Ultimately, Declassified Documents Online is “an easily navigable, highly selective, unique collection of digital documents,” which will enable “[n]ovice researchers [to] effortlessly access the collections by browsing or using simple keyword searches.” As Smith concluded, its “wealth of information … makes it a valuable addition to any academic library.” As a fairly large and unique collection, the database can be difficult to compare to others, though the UK National Archive’s own website and Taylor & Francis’s Secret Files from World Wars to Cold War are possible alternatives. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.

This review is a summary of a longer review by Donna B. Smith, Northern Kentucky University, originally published in ccAdvisor.org. Copyright © 2021 by The Charleston Company. —Abstracted from, ccAdvisor

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IBISWorld. IBISWorld, 2021. Contact publisher for pricing.
https://www.ibisworld.com

“IBISWorld provides industry and market reports for a wide variety of consumer and manufacturing industries,” which “cover what is occurring in an industry, projections for the industry, and details on business conditions in the industry,” wrote Breezy Silver for ccAdvisor. Reports span “18 industry sectors with 700 industries,” and most are for the US, though there is also content for such countries as Canada, Mexico, the UK, and China. Accordingly, IBISWorld will best serve anyone “researching industries or markets,” particularly those “investigat[ing] business opportunities and industry and market trends.”

“When first accessing IBISWorld, there is a large search box that allows users to search by industry, key word, company, or code,” Silver noted. A navigation bar across the top of the homepage also allows users to access tools such as the Business Environment Profiles, the Industry Wizard Tool, Risk Rating Reports, iExpert Call Briefs, and COVID-19 tools. As Silver detailed, “[t]he Business Environment Profiles include information on the key drivers affecting industry performance,” “[t]he Industry Wizard Tool allows users to query industry data,” “[t]he Risk Rating Reports describe the risks facing an industry, and the iExpert Call Briefs are concise introductory reports on industries.”

Users are most likely to access the industry reports, which are the core of IBISWorld, by searching, though unfortunately the search function does not allow results to be filtered by type of industry and/or date. “There is also no clear indication of how the reports are sorted,” Silver contended, and results can often include reports to which an institution does not subscribe, further complicating the search function.

Though “[i]t would be impossible to name all the competing industry databases,” Silver concluded, Mintel Reports, MarketLine, and Euromonitor Passport are the main competitors. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.

This review is a summary of a longer review by Breezy Silver, Gast Business Library, Michigan State University, originally published in ccAdvisor.org. Copyright © 2021 by The Charleston Company. —Abstracted from, ccAdvisor

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ProQuest One Business. ProQuest, 2021. Contact publisher for pricing.
https://about.proquest.com/products-services/ProQuest-One-Business.html

With “access to millions of full-text, business-related content, including … scholarly and popular periodicals, market research reports, company topic pages, dissertations, books, and videos,” ProQuest One Business “aims to provide researchers with resources that will enhance practical learning and research skills,” wrote Kaci Resau for ccAdvisor. The database is particularly “useful for students and researchers in business, finance, economics, marketing, global studies, law, technology, and political science,” Resau added, incorporating such standout elements as “integrated searching and access to full texts, … SWOT analyses, and media content.”

Designed “to meet the needs of undergraduate researchers’ most common assignments,” ProQuest One Business’s interface is sleek and intuitive to use, adopting the same comfortable design as other ProQuest databases. “[T]he main search bar … enables researchers to gain access to only the content they need without doing a basic search unless they need to.” Searching for a given term will generate “widgets that display reports, books, and videos along the right side of the screen” to “help match the researcher with relevant content to prevent multiple searches or facet adjustments.” Adjustments can be made “to access content by Source Type, Publication Date, Publication Title, Corporation, Industry Term, Location, Subject, Document Type, Report Type, Report Containing, and Language.” Resau further noted that since “much of the content overlaps across other databases in the ProQuest suite,” subscribers “will need to perform an overlap analysis to avoid licensing content they can already access.”

“The closest competitor to ProQuest One Business is EBSCO’s Business Source Ultimate,” Resau concluded, adding that institutions may prefer to subscribe to one over the other depending on whether they already subscribe to more EBSCO or ProQuest products. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

This review is a summary of a longer review by Kaci Resau, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, originally published in ccAdvisor.org. Copyright © 2021 by The Charleston Company. —Abstracted from, ccAdvisor

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Sex and Sexuality Module II: Self-expression, Community, and Identity. Adam Matthew, 2021.
https://www.sexandsexuality.amdigital.co.uk/

Sex & Sexuality, Module II: Self-Expression, Community, and Identity “is a collection of digitized primary sources from US, UK, and Australian archives” with “content from the 19th to [the] 21st centuries,” wrote Dawn Behrend for ccAdvisor. The module “focuses on the LGBTQ+ experience,” and “utilizes personal records, such as diaries and correspondence, and various organizational documents to delve into … lived experiences” Content is divided into 10 topics (e.g., “Organizations, Societies, and Advocacy Groups”; “Sexual Behaviors”; “Health”), with “[n]otable elements includ[ing] the National Lesbian and Gay Survey, capturing the experiences of gay people in late-20th- and early-21st-century Britain” and “[a]rchival content cover[ing] … the Stonewall Riots and HIV/AIDS crisis,” Behrend added.

Content can be sorted by choosing “View All Documents,” which allows “users [to] browse by collection or topic,” or by using Advanced Search, which enables searching by keyword, title, people, or place using Boolean operators, word stemming, or proximity. Results can then be filtered “by date, collection, topic, and document type or limit[ed] to secondary resources,” Behrend noted. 

As Behrend concluded, Sex & Sexuality Module II expands on Module I with its unique focus “on the personal experiences, activism, and touchstone historical events of the LGBTQ+ community … from the 1800s to the current day,” making it “a beneficial resource [for] those studying gender and human sexuality at the undergraduate and graduate levels.” However, by pulling content only from US, UK, and Australian archives, “the product cannot provide a truly global perspective on human sexuality,” and because of its “archival … nature, it does not provide access to emerging scholarship.” Therefore, “[u]sers seeking more current, global primary and secondary resources on gender, women’s, and LBGTQ+ topics may find ProQuest’s GenderWatch more suitable.” Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

This review is a summary of a longer review by Dawn Behrend, Lenoir-Rhyne University, originally published in ccAdvisor.org. Copyright © 2021 by The Charleston Company. —Abstracted from, ccAdvisor

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