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New Databases

March 11, 1999 Author: CDLCategories:

The addition of these databases to CDL’s Directory is the result of successful collaboration and co-investment among the campuses and CDL.

a. HarpWeek

HarpWeek is an indexed, image database containing cover-to-cover issues of Harper’s Weekly from its beginning in 1857 through the end of the Civil War in 1865.  Harper’s Weekly provided week-to-week coverage and analysis of newsworthy events from all over the world during the last half of the 19th century. In addition, it was the leading illustrated and literary periodical of its time.  Harpers Weekly hired the best authors, artists, and cartoonists, as well as reporters, to provide daily frontline coverage of the Civil War.  At its peak, circulation exceeded 100,000, and its readership probably exceeded half a million people.

The combination of HarpWeek’s easy-to-navigate, multi-level search structure and thorough and relevent indexing allows for very precise searching.  Users can also basically browse through electronic issues of Harper’s Weekly from cover to cover with HarpWeek.  Illustrations and ads, as well as articles and essays, can be searched and displayed.  Users can also search by literary genre, date, and occupation.

The HarpWeek index will be updated periodically to reflect new information.  Please contact: support@HarpWeek.com.Scholarship to report any corrections or commentary.

b. Chadwyck-Healey’s Literature Online (LION)

Literature Online contains more than 210,000 texts of poems, plays, and novels in fully searchable SGML format.

It provides hypertext links to approximately 15,000 more literary texts on free web sites throughout the Internet and reports on the content and nature of each site indexed.

It contains dictionaries and well-known reference works and bibliographies in the field of English and American literature, including works not previously available electronically.

It provides easy structured access to discussion groups, electronic journals, meta-pages, author pages, general literary web sites, and library catalogs in English and American literature.

Literary Texts reside in the following fields:

  • English Poetry: Essentially the complete English poetic canon from 600 to 1900.  Over 165,000 poems by more than 1,250 poets drawn from nearly 4,500 printed sources.
  • English Drama: A combination of Chadwyck-Healey’s English Verse Drama and English Prose Drama full-text databases.  4,000 plays by 700 authors from the late 13th century to the early 20th century.
  • Early English Prose Fiction: Over 200 complete works in fictional prose from the period 1500-1700, by writers from the British Isles.
  • Editions and Adaptation of Shakespeare: Eleven major editions from the First Folio to the Cambridge edition of 1863-6, 24 separate contemporary printings of individual plays, selected apocrypha, and related works and over 100 adaptations, sequels, and burlesques from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.
  • The Bible in English: Twenty-one versions of the Bible. In addition to 13 complete Bibles, there are five New Testament works, two Gospel works, and William Tyndale’s New Testament, Pentateuch, and Jonah translations.
  • The King James ‘Authorized’ Version: The King James ‘Authorized’ Version is included in its own right to provide a single Bible for reference purposes.
  • 18th-Century Fiction: 77 complete works in English prose from the period 1700-1780, by writers from the British Isles. Includes a scanned version of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and two different editions of Richardson’s Clarissa and Pamela and of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
  • American Poetry: Over 40,000 poems by more than 200 American poets from the Colonial Period to the early 20th century.
  • African-American Poetry: Nearly 3,000 poems written by African-American poets in the late 18th and 19th centuries.

c. Chadwyck-Healey’s Periodicals Contents Index (PCI)

PCI is an electronic index to the contents of thousands of periodicals in the humanities and social sciences published since 1770.  It covers each periodical comprehensively, from its first issue to 1990/1991.  Every article is indexed.

The scope is international, including journals in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and other Western languages.

Every year, PCI adds records for more than a million articles.  It already covers 1,730 journals and includes records for over six and a half million articles.  It will grow to encompass 3,500 journals and fifteen million individual articles.  You can view all of the titles in the titles list on the PCI website on http://pci.chadwyck.com/.

PCI covers the following subjects:

  • Anthropology and Ethnology
  • Archaeology and Ancient Civilizations
  • Area Studies
  • Art and Architecture
  • Black Studies
  • Economics and Business Studies
  • Education
  • Geography
  • History
  • History (American)
  • Humanities (General)
  • Jewish Studies
  • Law
  • Library and Information Science
  • Linguistics and Philology
  • Literature
  • Music and Performing Arts
  • Philosophy
  • Political Science and Public Administration
  • Psychology
  • Religious Studies
  • Social Studies