New Resources Available

NOTE: New resources listed below may not yet be in the CDL Directory of Collections and Services; they will be added within the next 2 weeks.  You can access them directly from the URL provided.

A list of recently added content is always available at: http://www.cdlib.org/news/

a. BMJ Specialty Journals Now Available (Jo Anne Boorkman, UCD)

Negotiations have been finalized for access to the specialized medical journals available from BMJ Publishing Group as a Tier 2 license for UCB, UCD, UCI, UCLA, UCR, UCSD, and UCSF.  Full text access is currently available at <http://www.bmjjournals.com> for:

Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases
Archives of Disease in Childhood
British Journal of Ophthalmology
British Journal of Sports Medicine
Emergency Medicine Journal
Evidence-Based Medicine
Evidence-Based Mental Health
Evidence-Based Nursing
Gut
Heart
Journal of Clinical Pathology
Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health
Journal of Medical Ethics
Journal of Medical Genetics
Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry
Medical Humanities
Molecular Pathology
Occupational & Environmental Medicine
Postgraduate Medical Journal
Quality and Safety in Healthcare
Sexually Transmitted Infections
Thorax
Tobacco Control
Pediatric Asthma, a virtual Journal

Jo Anne Boorkman and Karl Kocher at UC Davis negotiated this license on behalf of the UC Health Sciences Selectors Group, with the assistance of the CDL staff.

b. Three Alexander Street Press Databases

CDL reached agreement with Alexander Street Press (ASP), an independent publisher of scholarly works, to license three new historical databases: Early Encounters in North America – People, Cultures, and the Environment, Black Drama, and Asian American Drama.

The ASP databases were recommended by a wide variety of UC selector groups in Ethnic Studies, Literature, Africana, Performing Arts and British/US History.  The databases were endorsed by the Joint Steering Committee (JSC) on Shared Collections, and approved by the CDC as important contributions to our digital collection of scholarly historical resources.  The license negotiated by CDL contains perpetual and archival access to guarantee ongoing UC research for future generations.

As part of its collaborative mission, CDL fully funded this one-time pre-publication purchase, supported by co-investment from participating campuses to cover an annual Web access fee for each database.

Alexander Street Press has acknowledged the critical contribution of Cindy Shelton, Assoc.  UL at UCLA, whose insightful conversations with the publisher helped guide their editorial direction for Early Encounters.  CDL wishes to thank Rob Melton, Literature/Humanities Bibliographer at UCSD, for his thoughtful critique of the performing arts databases.

The new databases complement previously licensed databases from Alexander Street Press: North American Women’s Letters and Diaries, Colonial – 1950 (Vol. 1-5) and American Civil War Letters and Diaries, Vol. 1-5.

Early Encounters in North America: People, Cultures, and the Environment

Assembled from hundreds of primary sources, <http://www.alexanderstreet2.com/EENALive/> this database documents the relationships among peoples and with the environment in North America from 1534 to 1850.  The collection focuses on personal accounts and provides unique perspectives from all of the protagonists, including traders, slaves, missionaries, explorers, soldiers, native peoples, and officials, both men and women.

It includes works by American Indians as well as a wide range of Europeans.  It captures first impressions, records hundreds of years of observations of flora and fauna, describes encounters with native peoples, presents a new literature with words and metaphors created in response to new places, and much more.  The database includes prints, drawings, paintings, maps, bibliographies, letters, photographs, and original facsimile pages all searchable by standardized vocabulary.

Black Drama

Black Drama <http://www.alexanderstreet2.com/BLDRLive/> integrates approximately 1,200 rare and hard-to-find plays written from the 1850s to the present by playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African Diaspora countries.  Nearly a quarter of the collection will consist of previously unpublished plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Zora Neale Hurston, Femi Euba, Randolph Edmonds, and others.  James Vernon Hatch, a leading historian and scholar in this area and curator of one of the world’s largest collections of black drama, is serving as the project’s editorial advisor.

The result is an exceptionally deep and unified collection that illustrates the many purposes that black theater served: to give testimony to the ancient foundations of black culture; to protest injustices; to project emerging images of the new Black; and to give voice to the many and varied expressions of black creativity.

Part 1: North America, 1800-1950.  The collection includes musical comedies, domestic dramas, folk dramas, history plays, anti-slavery plays, one-act plays and other works, published in a wide range of magazines and anthologies.  It covers key writings of the Harlem Renaissance, works performed for the Federal Theatre Project, and plays by critically acclaimed dramatists of the 1940s, such as Langston Hughes.

Part 2: North America, 1960-1990. The second volume of the collection covers the “Black Arts” movement of the sixties and seventies, with playwrights such as Amiri Baraka and works performed by the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS), The Negro Ensemble Company, and others.

Part 3: African and Caribbean Drama, 1900-1990.  This collection brings together a wide range of playwrights from Ghana, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, The United Kingdom, The West Indies, and other parts of the world.

Asian American Drama

Asian American Drama <http://www.alexanderstreet2.com/AADRLive/> brings together more than 250 plays, along with related biographical, production, and theatrical information.  The collection begins with the works of Sadakichi Hartmann in the late nineteenth century and it is planned to include contemporary playwrights, such as Philip Kan Gotanda, Elizabeth Wong, and Jeannie Barroga.

The plays have relevance well beyond the study of literature, drama, and Asian American studies.  They present views of important historical events, such as the construction of the railroads in the nineteenth century, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the Vietnam conflict.  The plays also address sociological issues, such as assimilation, integration, and cultural identity in a Western context.  The effect of Western religion is also examined.

Asian American Drama represents the various ethnicities within the Asian American community.  Along with many works by writers of Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Chinese descent, the collection includes plays by writers of Hawaiian, Indian, Thai, Korean, Persian, and Malaysian ancestry.