LibraryLinks Fall 2005
New Databases Enhance Library Collections
By Ed Shephard
This fall, the University Libraries began providing access
to several databases which significantly increase the
University’s access to digital 
information in the Humanities,
Social Sciences, and Sciences.
The American Periodicals Series
Online is a unique and valuable
collection for all aspects of
American studies. It contains
digitized images of the pages of over 1,100 American magazines
and journals spanning nearly 200 years, from colonial times to
the advent of American involvement in World War II. Titles
range from America’s first scientific journal, Medical
Repository,
to popular magazines like Vanity Fair and Ladies’ Home
Journal.
Compendex (Engineering Village 2),
the leading database for engineering,
now includes coverage of the Engineering Index back to
1884. It references engineering journals and conference materials
and complements the Libraries’ current holdings 1970+ in Compendex.
Congressional Quarterly provides us with three databases. CQ Weekly offers full coverage of the U.S. Congress: status of bills, votes and amendments, floor and committee activity, and backroom maneuvering, searchable by keyword, topic, page number, committee, bill number, byline, and date. CQ Researcher is a weekly publication providing original in-depth analysis of the most current major and controversial issues of the day. CQ Historic Documents provides online access to more than 2,500 primary sources covering current events around the world from 1972 to the present. An introduction for each document provides historical and intellectual context.
The Libraries now have expanded coverage of the Science Citation Index back to 1983. The Science Citation Index Expanded is a multidisciplinary index, with searchable author abstracts, covering the journal literature of the sciences. It indexes more than 5,700 major journals across 164 scientific disciplines.
In addition to these available resources, the Libraries will begin
subscribing to the full Project Muse database in January 2006,
providing full-text online access to over 300 high quality Humanities,
Arts, and Social Sciences journals from 60 scholarly
publishers. Muse also has an email
alert function which will
allow users to be notified when
new issues of journals are added
to the database.