Category: E-Resource

Before Facebook, Twitter, and even television, weekly print news magazines captured national and world events and provided analysis and interpretation for most Americans. Collectively, these magazines had 10s of millions of weekly readers.

Our database, Magazine Archives, includes the full text of five of the most important 20th century popular news and business magazines: Time, Life, Forbes, Fortune, and Bloomberg Businessweek. Coverage is from the beginning of each magazine through 2000, with start dates ranging from 1917 for Fortune and Life starting the latest in 1936. Magazines can be searched, as Magazine Archives, or individually (all links are for current R-MC users only).

                

       

(Images courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Life was known for its photojournalism and many of the most famous images of the 20th century were published in this magazine, which covered both national and international events, politics, and culture. Time magazine has always been known for its in-depth coverage of the people who create the news in national and international current events, politics, sports, and entertainment. Forbes, Fortune, and Bloomberg Businessweek cover various aspects of business and economics with extensive coverage of the events and news that shape our world.

These primary source materials are invaluable in helping us understand the 20th century from the perspective of those that lived it.

Randolph-Macon College is one of over 750 members of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, known as ICPSR.

The ICPSR houses the world’s largest online repository of data sets for social science researchers, with more than 250,000 files of research in the social and behavioral sciences. Although predominantly social science-related data in areas such as education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, and terrorism, there are many data sets on a variety of topics related to the sciences, history, and other disciplines. These data sets are available for download and use by the entire R-MC community and are used with statistical software, such as SAS, SPSS, and Stata. Computer labs on campus already have SPSS installed.

Data sets range from studies such as Historical Transportation of Navigable Rivers, Canals, and Railroads in the United States to the National Surveys on Energy and the Environment, Fall 2008 and Fall 2015 to the American College Catalog Study Database, 1975-2011. In addition to locating data sets by broad topic, by title, or by keyword, you can also search by the variables in the studies as well as locate publications in which the data sets have been used.  Documentation for interpreting the data files as well as copies of surveys, questionnaires and other supporting materials are included.

To get started, Just click on the Log In/Create Account link at Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research from a campus computer and create an account.

is a database of over 800 great, reliable reference sources. Covering all subject areas, over 3.5 million articles in reference books and sets are full text searchable in Credo Reference.

You can search across all of the sources by keyword, or limit to sources in a particular subject area such as History, Technology & Engineering, or psychology, or even search in a single source such as Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Philosophers or Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink.

Although the Library has many great reference sources in print, online sources offer advantages in addition to full text access, such as 24/7 availability and off-campus access. Try this one next time you need to look something up!

 

 

If you need a picture for a class or conference presentation and usually go to Google images or Wikimedia Commons, try the Artstor Digital Library next time! The Artstor Digital Library is a database containing over 2 million high-quality images for education and research from a wide variety of contributors around the world. As you would expect, Artstor includes images of paintings, drawings, photographs, sculpture, and other objects from major museum and library collections, but this database includes much more! There are medical and botanical drawings; images of clothing as well as drawings for fashion design; architectural and landscape images; photojournalism collections; maps; manuscript page images – just about anything that can be scanned or photographed, including this image of R-MC’s own Washington and Franklin Hall from ArtStor’s Historic Campus  Architecture Collection. Complete information about the image or the object represented by the image is also included. Find Artstor on the Databases A-Z list available on the McGraw-Page Library website.

The American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection, a full-text database of thousands of magazines and publications from the late 1600s through the 1800s, provides a fascinating look at published information on any and all subjects important to people through our early history. For those needing PRIMARY SOURCES this is a great resource!

From advertisements for early sewing machines (some of these are scary), to essays on the honor of fighting a duel (think Hamilton!) to suggested medical treatments (jalapeno peppers for Scarlet Fever) to poems written to ladies with small pox (seriously!), this database gives us a look into life in earlier times.

These periodicals can be searched in our Discovery search or chosen from our alphabetical list of Databases.