Internet Resources: May 2022 Edition

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

Posted on May 5, 2022 in Internet Resources

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Art Magazine Collection Archive. EBSCO. Contact publisher for pricing.
https://www.ebsco.com/products/magazine-archives/art-magazine-collection-archive

“Art Magazine Collection Archive provides full-text access to the digital archives of three significant art publications, ARTnews, Art in America, and The Magazine ANTIQUES,” offering “an extensive chronicle of art collecting, fine arts, art history, interior design, decorative arts, folk art, antiquing, and architecture in the 20th and early 21st centuries,” wrote Erica Swenson Danowitz for ccAdvisor. The database includes 3,950 issues of the aforementioned publications in digital format, appearing as originally published with their original advertisements, which are even indexed and searchable. Art Magazine Collection Archive will best serve institutions “that support art and architecture-related research,” as well as “scholars conducting research in American society, thought, and culture during the 20th century.”

The platform’s “easily navigable and uncomplicated user interface resembles other EBSCO products,” with “various limiters, Boolean operators, truncation, and wildcard symbols” available for searching, wrote Danowitz. Advanced Search offers options to limit results by content (e.g., advertisements, articles, book reviews, editorials, cover art), and, as with other EBSCO products, users can search within a publication and even navigate the entire issue when an article is retrieved from that issue, though having the option to parse out results by checking a box at the initial search screen would make this product more user-friendly.

Though there are a few drawbacks, including the lack of abstracts for full-text articles, no option to compress large files, and occasional indexing peculiarities, Art Magazine Collection Archive is overall a rich collection containing scores of interesting articles and content. Moreover, while a few platforms, such as the Hathi Trust, JSTOR, and the Art in America website, offer access to older issues of some of the same magazines included here, access is much more limited when compared to Art Magazine Collection Archive. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.

This review is a summary of a longer review by Erica Swenson Danowitz, Delaware County Community College (retired), originally published in ccAdvisor.org. Copyright © 2022 by The Charleston Company. —Abstracted from, ccAdvisor

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ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. ProQuest. Contact publisher for pricing.
https://about.proquest.com/en/products-services/pqdtglobal

Containing over 5 million citations and 2.7 million full-text works, “ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global (PQDT) is the world’s largest multidisciplinary database for electronic theses and dissertations,” wrote Alissa Droog for ccAdvisor. It will be most useful for graduate students looking for sample dissertations and theses or researchers searching for the most recent research on a particular topic. Droog noted that the “theses and dissertations are sourced from over 3,100 institutions and 100 countries,” representing over 50 languages, although most of the records are in English, and spanning all of the major subjects and disciplines. As she elaborated, “theses and dissertations [typically] end up in PQDT by one of three methods: submissions via ProQuest’s online proprietary ETD Administrator tool; individual FTP submissions with a fee; and online harvesting from institutional repositories … via ProQuest’s Open Archives Initiative.”

The intuitive user interface, which will be familiar to those who have used other ProQuest products, incorporates “many specialized search features that are unique to dissertation and theses,” to facilitate ease of use. These include the Browsing option, which “allows a user to browse by hundreds of defined subjects in the database, or by the country or institution from which the theses or dissertation was completed,” and 24 Advanced Search fields, “such as abstract, author, title, publication year, and subject headings,” as well as school name/code, location (country or state), department, degree, advisor, or committee member, as Droog detailed.

Droog recalled “encounter[ing] very few challenges with this database,” noting that it “is probably the easiest to use and has the best searchable metadata for dissertations and theses worldwide.” However, competitive products do exist, as she also noted, including the freely accessible Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, which appears to have greater global scope and language coverage than PQDT. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students and faculty.

This review is a summary of a longer review by Alissa Droog, Northern Illinois University, originally published in ccAdvisor.org. Copyright © 2022 by The Charleston Company. —Abstracted from, ccAdvisor

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PsyArXiv. Center for Open Science. Contact publisher for pricing.
https://psyarxiv.com

“PsyArXiv, an Open Access preprint service, is the only platform in North America dedicated to making psychology and psychological science papers available to scholars, students, and the general public prior to peer review,” wrote Margie Ruppel for ccAdvisor. As a preprint repository, PsyArXiv “accepts papers under review, working papers, and studies that may never be published due to null findings or serving as replication studies,” in order to facilitate more rapid research dissemination, Ruppel added, noting that all preprints “are indexed by Google Scholar, SHARE, Unpaywall, Europe PubMed Central, and Microsoft Academic.” With “an abundance of new scholarship in all areas of psychology, an Open Access infrastructure using the Open Science Framework, and links to associated outputs,” PsyArXiv will be particularly useful for “social and behavioral scientists,” who “routinely seek preprints and working papers for research and teaching purposes.”

Navigating the site is easy, according to Ruppel, given its limited functionality. The “home page displays … a prominent search box, featured subjects for browsing, and [a] quick [link] to submit a paper,” after selecting which “content is scanned for text overlap, legal and ethical compliance, and fit with scope.” Users will primarily rely on keyword searching, with results displayed by default by order of relevance, or filtered by broad subject area, if chosen.

“Drawbacks include some accessibility issues and a lack of prominent notices on preprints indicating that they have not gone through the peer review process,” Ruppel noted. However, given that “PsyArXiv is the only platform in North America dedicated to … improving access to research and grey literature in psychology,” there is still much of value here. As Ruppel pointed out, “Psycharchives.org is the only other preprint platform dedicated to psychology, but it is based in Germany and is smaller in scale.” Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.

This review is a summary of a longer review by Margie Ruppel, University of Kentucky Libraries, originally published in ccAdvisor.org. Copyright © 2022 by The Charleston Company. —Abstracted from, ccAdvisor

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Theology and Religion Online. Bloomsbury. Contact publisher for pricing.
https://www.theologyandreligiononline.com

“Theology & Religion Online (TARO) is a digital repository consisting of four library collections that focus on Protestant and Catholic doctrine, studies into the historical Jesus, and religion in North America,” wrote Larry Sheret for ccAdvisor. The four (soon to be six) collections are the T&T Clark Theology Library, the T&T Clark Jesus Library, the Library of Catholic Thought (T&T Clark Catholic Library), and Bloomsbury Religion in North America. These tend to focus on Christian doctrine and history, with the exception of Bloomsbury Religion in North America, which includes such major faith traditions as Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam, as well as lesser-known sects. Content across the collections spans “newly digitized primary texts by major theologians, multivolume works, references, ebooks, chapters, articles, an image library, peer-reviewed secondary readings on core topics, and commentary on lectionaries.” With authoritative, comprehensive, and regularly updated resources, this database will be of use to everyone from high school students to scholars. 

Users familiar with other EBSCO products will find the platform easily navigable, with the search bar appearing at the top of every screen. By default, the Basic Search searches by keyword across all four collections, or only those collections that have been subscribed to. “The Advanced Search function accommodates phrase and Boolean searches, but not wildcards, truncation, or proximity searches,” Sheret added.

As Sheret concluded, TARO is a great resource for research, and “because of [its] careful curation … there is not much overlap,” though there are some gaps, which the site’s annual updates aim to address. For instance, “TARO gained significantly more breadth and depth by adding two stand-alone collections in late 2021: [t]he six-volume Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary … and the Anchor Yale Bible Commentaries.” Possible competitors might include Gale eBooks, Credo Online Reference, or ATLA. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.

This review is a summary of a longer review by Larry Sheret, Marshall University, originally published in ccAdvisor.org. Copyright © 2022 by The Charleston Company. —Abstracted from, ccAdvisor

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