Chesnutt Library Blog

“Because it’s all about ‘U,’” the Chesnutt Library Blog is designed to promptly and efficiently provide timely news, inform of library events, books, databases and more for our students, staff and faculty. In our effort to enhance communication, the Chesnutt Library Blog will bring academic resources together in one place, with one click, with one purpose in mind - Educational Excellence - designed to enhance learning, guarantee access and promote scholarship.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Black History Month Database Highlights

There are many databases that provide information on persons of note with African American heritage and their works. Here are a few that Chesnutt Library makes available through their Database Finder page at http://library.uncfsu.edu/edatabases.html.

African American Poetry Nearly 3,000 poems written by African-American poets in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indexed from 1750 to 1900.

African American Song African American Song is the first online resource to document the history of African American music in an online music listening service. The collection contains a diverse range of genres such as jazz, blues, gospel, ragtime, folk songs, and narratives, among others. This release features some 16,000 tracks. Earphones are required to use the resource in the library.

American Slavery: A Composite Autobiography A collection of the life histories of former slaves in the United States compiled through nearly 4,000 interviews with ex-slaves.

Black Drama This edition of Black Drama contains approximately 1200 plays by 201 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays. An Alexander Street Press database.

Black Short Fiction Black Short Fiction contains approximately 4,919 stories and folktales by 435 African, African American, and Caribbean authors. When complete this collection should have approximately 8,000 works of short fiction.

Black Studies Center Black Studies Center is a fully cross-searchable gateway to Black Studies including scholarly essays, recent periodicals and historical newspaper articles.

Black Thought and Culture Black Thought and Culture contains 989 sources with 947 authors, covering the non-fiction published works of leading African Americans.

Black Women in America In nearly 600 entries, Black Women in America celebrates the remarkable achievements of black women throughout history, highlights their ongoing contributions in America today, and represents the new research the first edition helped to generate.

Black Women Writers Black Women Writers will contain approximately 100,000 pages of fiction, nonfiction and poetry by women from North America, Africa and the Caribbean. It will also present essays by scholars and feminists about the history of feminism and genre studies in these regions. There are 13,000 pages of text in this first release.

Oxford African American Studies Center The Oxford African American Studies Center provides students, scholars and librarians with more than 8,000 articles by top scholars in the field. The core content includes: Africana Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present Black Women in America, Second Edition African American National Biography.

Race Relations Abstracts Bibliographic records covering essential areas related to race relations, including ethnic studies, discrimination, immigration studies, and other areas of key relevance to the discipline. The index contains more than 43,000 records, which are carefully selected from the most important sources within the discipline.

Twentieth Century African-American Poetry "A database of modern and contemporary African American poetry, featuring almost 9,000 poems by 62 of the most important African American poets of the last century"

America: History and Life Historical coverage of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present.

American National Biography The premier biographical resource for notable people in American history. Click on the "Subscribers Click Here" link in the menu at the top of the page.