HISTORY: MEDIEVAL : DATABASES : RESEARCH: TECHNIQUES: Finding Medieval History in Databases
David P. Dillard
This is a response to a discussion on another list regarding research
methods in the days of print indexes and card catalogs with heavy drawers
that we pulled out of the holders, dropped on our feet and went to the
hospital with the days now seen of instant information via the internet.
--------------------------------------------
I was a student and began my career when print and card catalogs were the tools
of research. One had to know exaxt author's names, exact titles to and the
correct Library of Congress Subject Headings to use the catalog with any
success, now we live in a blessed age of keyword searching. There is hope of
success if we only know that some critter named Smith wrote a book with the
word medieval in the title, or was it middle ages.
Medieval and Smith
<http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=ti%3Amedieval+au%3Asmith&qt=advanced>
Middle Ages and Smith
<http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=ti%3A%
22middle+ages%22+au%3Asmith&qt=results_page>
A shorter URL for the above link:
Despite the enormous availability of databases on a wide range of topics,
Dialog
<http://library.dialog.com/bluesheets/html/blf.html>
"Providing more than 15 terabytes of content from the world's most
authoritative publishers, and the tools to search every bit of it with speed
and precision."
Datastar
http://ds.datastarweb.com/datasheets/
OVID
<http://www.ovid.com/site/catalog/Catalog_DataBase.jsp?
top=2&mid=3&bottom=7&subsection=10>
A shorter URL for the above link:
EBSCO
<http://www.ebscohost.com/thisMarket.php?marketID=1>
<http://www.ebscohost.com/>
Cambridge Scientific Abstracts
<http://www.csa.com/e_products/databases-collections.php>
Which now owns ProQuest Direct
and others like H.W. Wilson, Gale Infotrac, First Search of OCLC and home of
Worldcat, Engineering Village, Science Direct, Acess News, Lexis Nexis, Westlaw
and more, as I was saying, despite this embarrassment of riches in databases
including JSTOR and MUSE, there are no databases devoted to either medieval or
ancient history that I am aware of from major commercial vendors of databases,
that makes researching these periods of history far more difficult using tools
taken for granted in other fields.
There is of course coverage of medieval history in quite a few general
databases, but there is also a handicap here in the field of history.
ABC-CLIO in its infinite wisdom decided to start Historical Abstracts and
American History and Life at the year 1492 and forward, that does little for
Ancient and Medieval Historians. Within the last week or two these two
databases have become available on the EBSCO search interface as a result of
the purchase of these databases from ABC-CLIO a couple of months or so ago to
complement EBSCO's own History Reference Center. There is coverage of the
medieval period in History Reference Center.
S5 medieval Limiters - Full Text
View Results (4086)
Revise Search
View Details
Interface - EBSCOhost
Search Screen - Advanced Search
Database - History Reference Center
S4 medieval Limiters - Peer Reviewed
View Results (3463)
Revise Search
View Details
Interface - EBSCOhost
Search Screen - Advanced Search
Database - History Reference Center
S3 SU medieval
View Results (1918)
Revise Search
View Details
Interface - EBSCOhost
Search Screen - Advanced Search
Database - History Reference Center
S2 TI medieval
View Results (1998)
Revise Search
View Details
Interface - EBSCOhost
Search Screen - Advanced Search
Database - History Reference Center
S1 medieval
View Results (4280)
Revise Search
View Details
I think it would be extremely safe to suggest that these numbers do not reflect
comprehensive coverage of the journal literature of the medieval period,
possibly up there for the understatement of the year.
Worldcat is a place that one can book for monographic coverage of the medieval
period, below an indication of the results for a search of the word medieval,
which, of course, is only a small part of the titles pertinent to medieval
history.
Results 1-10 of about 142,207
If one compares this number for books to the EBSCO number for journal articles,
one may have trouble discontinuing their laughter. EBSCO's history database is
clearly not very deep in medieval history, but more of a soup starter kind of
product.
Sample Worldcat Record:
Mysteries of the Middle Ages : the rise of feminism, science, and art from the
cults of Catholic Europe
by Thomas Cahill
Type: Book
Language: English
Publisher: New York : N.A. Talese, 2006.
ISBN: 0385495552 9780385495554
OCLC: 65820500
Related Subjects: Civilization, Medieval. | Women -- Europe -- History --
Middle Ages, 500-1500. | Science, Medieval. | Art, Medieval.
Editions: 6 Editions
Citations: Cite this Item | Export to EndNote | Export to RefWorks
Additional Info: Table of contents only | Contributor biographical information
| Publisher description | Sample text
Displaying libraries 1-10 out of 956
1. Temple University Libraries Philadelphia, PA 19122 United States
< 1 mile
Book
Services: Library Information Ask a librarian
2. University of Pennsylvania Libraries Philadelphia, PA 19104 United States
3 miles
Book
Services: Library Information Ask a librarian
3. Swarthmore College Swarthmore, PA 19081 United States
12 miles
Book
Services: Library Information
4. Cabrini College Library Radnor, PA 19087 United States
13 miles
Book
Services: Library Information
5. Delaware County Library Syst Media, PA 19063 United States
15 miles
Book
Services: Library Information
6. Neumann College Library Aston, PA 19014 United States
17 miles
Book
Services: Library Information
7. West Chester University W Chester, PA 19383 United States
24 miles
Book
Services: Library Information Ask a librarian
8. Mercer County Library Lawrenceville, NJ 08648 United States
31 miles
Book
Services: Library Information
9. University of Delaware Newark, DE 19717 United States
36 miles
Book
Services: Library Information
10. Atlantic County Library Mays Landing, NJ 08330 United States
44 miles
Other Formats: Compact disc
Services: Library Information
There are article listings related to medieval in these databases as well
amongst others:
Academic Search Premier
CAB
Francis
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine List of Records
[Formerly an RLG database, now on the First Search server]
IBSS: International Bibliography of the Social Sciences
International Medieval Bibliography Online
[This is not from one of the major database vendors]
JSTOR
MLA
MUSE
Periodical Abstracts (ProQuest)
Web of Science
Wilson OmniFile
There are others, but a field with this need to use more general databases
search tools due to such a limit in databases devoted to medieval history can
use all of the help it can get from say internet search tools.
Such as Google Scholar
Scholar
Results 1 - 10 of about 573,000 for medieval
and Google Books
Books
Books 1 - 10 of 463600 on medieval.
not to mention Scirus
All of the words:medieval
Found:: :1,294,269 total | 24,563 journal results | 13,459 preferred web
results | 1,256,247 other web results
So since medieval history, pardon the expression, is in the dark ages of
commercial database availability of databases devoted to medieval research
publications, the internet specialized search tools certainly serve to shed
more light on the research publications in this field.
Sincerely,
David Dillard
Temple University
(215) 204 - 4584
jw...@temple.edu
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