Internet Resources: May 2021 Edition

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

Posted on May 6, 2021 in Internet Resources

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CINAHL Complete. EBSCO Informational Services, 2021. Contact publisher for pricing.
https://www.ebsco.com/products/research-databases/cinahl-complete

“The Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) is a well-known and highly respected subscription aggregate database serving the research needs of nurses and allied health professionals, health sciences students and instructors, and clinical researchers,” wrote Dawn Behrend for ccAdvisor. Available via the EBSCOhost platform, the collection indexes over 5,600 journals, 1,200 of which are full-text offerings. Holdings include trade publications, reports, books, newspapers, and other publication types, though the majority are academic journals. As Behrend added, the site is notable for “its substantial indexing of core publications in the nursing field,” covering “50 nursing specialties as well as such popular health science disciplines as speech and language pathology, nutrition, and general health and medicine.” Other added-value features include the “use of [Medical Subject Headings], and numerous options for advanced searching unique to the health sciences,” as well as “accredited continuing education modules, evidence-based care sheets, and quick lessons,” Behrend continued. This platform “will be valuable to any academic library supporting health sciences programs,” she wrote, “and essential to medical libraries supporting professionals in the healthcare field.”

To search content, users can navigate to the main search page to conduct a basic or advanced search, view their search history, or create an alert. Standard search limiters include “date, full-text, peer-reviewed, English language, and publication type, as well as clinical queries, gender, and image.” Advanced search options include 47 fields for refining results, many of which are not available in similar products, including author affiliation, legal case, and MEDLINE Info. Similar products include ProQuest’s Nursing & Allied Health Source and EBSCO’s MEDLINE with Full Text. Each one differs in its breadth of coverage, user interface, and availability of value-added features. Summing Up: Highly 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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Food and Drink in History. Adam Matthew, 2020. Contact publisher for pricing.
https://www.amdigital.co.uk/primary-sources/food-and-drink

“Food and Drink in History (FADH) provides access to primary sources to facilitate and support research in the burgeoning field of food studies, which has grown substantially” as “an important lens … [for] examin[ing] the history and context of cultural power dynamics such as colonialism, socioeconomic disparities, race, gender, religion, ethnicity, and identity,” wrote Michael DeNotto for ccAdvisor. As he observed, “the most prominent aspect of the FADH collection is the robust number of unique historical cookbooks, which largely date from the 16th to the 21st centuries.” The database encapsulates two modules (Module I and Module II), both of which include an international assortment of historical cookbooks, historical food periodicals, and ephemera (e.g., menus, advertising, and labels), among other content. Of particular note are the rare Apicius Cookbooks, which date to the ninth century. 

The database can be navigated through the main search bar on the home page, the collapsed menu in the top banner, or through the different headings listed in the banner (i.e., Introduction, Documents, Apicius Cookbooks, Research Tools, Image Gallery, and Help), which lead the user to different areas of the resource. Known-item searching and browsing via Theme or Directory are successful techniques for preliminary research. Typical limiters, such as Date, Theme, Library/Archive, and Document Type, can then be used to filter search results.

“Alexander Street Press’s Food Studies Online is the product most comparable to [FADH],” and there is even some overlap between the two, as both sources pull content from some of the same collections. “However, FADH draws from a wider variety of university collections, and it has a greater international focus,” DeNotto concluded, making it a valuable resource for food studies programs and a variety of other disciplines. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty

This review is a summary of a longer review by Michael DeNotto, Hope College, originally published in ccAdvisor.org. Copyright © 2021 by The Charleston Company.—Abstracted from, ccAdvisor

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OECD iLibrary. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2021. Contact publisher for pricing.
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/

“The OECD iLibrary is a collection of materials written and published by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which measures and documents trends, economics, and sociopolitical issues arising within its member countries,” wrote Jane Duffy for ccAdvisor. This database will appeal to a wide audience across diverse sectors given the depth and breadth of its material (primarily books, papers, and statistics), including almost 16,000 ebook titles, 82,000 chapters, almost a quarter million tables and graphs, and seven billion data points across 44 databases, drawn from more than 80 countries. “The site also functions as a data repository,” Duffy noted, making it sure to interest research laboratories, universities, governments, NGOs, and special, public, and academic libraries. 

Navigation is very easy; users may search the OECD iLibrary through drop-down menus on the home page, which allow for browsing by country, theme, a combination of country and theme, catalogue, and statistics. The theme search may best help users orient themselves to the full scope of the collection though 17 subject headings, including agriculture and food, development, economics, education, and environment, among others. Helpfully, digital object identifiers and/or static URLs anchor references for easy and reliable retrieval. As Duffy pointed out, the platform also “provides seamless access to technology architecture to generate researchers’ tables and other visual representations of their work.” 

While the OECD iLibrary’s wide range of content is not exhaustive, it provides “the foundation for a number of international planning and research projects” and offers researchers the tools needed to produce and disseminate their work. International Financial Statistics, World Development Indicators, and UNData stand out as possible alternatives, though they do not offer the unique set of data points available through OECD iLibrary. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through two-year program students.

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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