Trials: Le Monde; Al-Ahram Digital Archive (1875-2020); Global Newsstream

Oxford historians are invited to trial the following newspaper resources. You will need SSO for off-campus access.

Global Newsstream (trial until 19 May 2021)

Global Newsstream contains full text articles from over 3,000 news sources, providing current coverage from many sources as well as archives extending back to the 1980s. Included are a number of key UK, US and international titles such as the Guardian, The New York Times, El Mundo and Le Monde.

Global Newsstream’s coverage of Le Monde from 2011 to the present complements ProQuest’s historical archive of Le Monde from 1944 to 2000. As both databases are on the ProQuest platform the two databases are cross-searchable. The trial of Global Newsstream will run for the same time as the trial of Le Monde (Historical archive) until 19 May 2021.

Please note that as only 25% of the historical archive of Le Monde is available for the current trial; there will be another trial of both databases in September 2021 (when the Le Monde historical archive database will be complete).

Please send any feedback to nick.hearn@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Le Monde (trial until 19 May 2021)  

The historical archive of Le Monde – one of the newspapers of record for France – is now available in full-page digital image format from Proquest. The period covered is from the foundation of Le Monde in 1944 up to 2000. It should be noted that only 25% of the content of this database is currently available. It is cross-searchable with Global Newsstream (also a ProQuest product) which covers Le Monde from 2011 up to the present (and also includes a range of other key UK, US and other international newspapers).

The Bodleian Libraries trial will end on 19 May. Another trial of both databases will be held in September 2021 when the Le Monde historical archive will be complete.

Please send any feedback to nick.hearn@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

Al-Ahram Digital Archive (1875-2020) (trial until 15 May)

Founded in 1875, Al-Ahram (الأهرام‎) is one of the most prominent Arabic newspapers in the Middle East, with a legacy as Egypt’s most authoritative and influential national daily. Al-Ahram established itself as a high-quality journalistic venture during the mid-20th century reporting across the political, social, economic and cultural scope of the nation. After President Nasser nationalized the Egyptian press in 1960, readers generally considered the paper the de facto voice of the central government. Al-Ahram has long featured contributions from many of the Arab world’s most important literary figures and intellectuals: Naguib Mahfouz, Edward Said, Yusuf Idris, Taha Hussein, Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayed, and Azmi Bishara among them, as well as nationalist leaders such as Mustafa Kamil and Saad Zaghlul. Influential forward-leaning contemporary writers such as Sabah Hamamou are also affiliated with the paper. The newspaper over its history successfully expanded to circulate content from around the world, printing international editions as well as Arabic-language editions of the daily. The Al-Ahram Digital Archive features full page-level digitization, with page-views and searchable text. It offers scholars Arabic and English interfaces, options to download or print pages in high resolution, and features to crowd-source improvements to the OCRed text.

Please send feedback to lydia.wright@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

Trial – The Middle East Online: Iraq, 1914-1974 (GALE Archives Unbound) until 30 April 2021

The Middle East Online: Iraq, 1914-1974 (GALE Archives Unbound)

Trial until 30 April 2021 – accessible via Databases A-Z  Please send feedback to lydia.wright@bodleian.ox.ac.uk and marialuisa.langella@sant.ox.ac.uk

Map showing the distribution of Kurds in the Middle East, 1963, The National Archives

Iraq 1914-1974 offers the widest range of original source material from the Foreign Office, Colonial Office, War Office and Cabinet Papers from the Anglo-Indian landing in Basra in 1914 through the British Mandate in Iraq of 1920-32 to the rise of Saddam Hussein in 1974. Here major policy statements are set out in their fullest context, the minor documents and marginalia revealing the workings of the mandate administration, diplomacy, treaties, oil and arms dealing. Topics covered include: The Siege of Kut-al-Amara, The War in Mesapotamia and the capture of Baghdad in 1917, Introduction of the British Mandate, and the installation of King Faisal in 1921, The British administration in Baghdad, Gertrude Bell, advisor to the British administration, in both reports and memos, The Arab Uprising of 1920, Independence, and Iraq’s membership of the League of Nations in 1932, Coups d’etat in the 1930s and 1940s, The Baghdad Pact of 1955 and the military coup of 1958 leading to the establishment of a republic, The Cold War and Soviet intervention in Iraq, Kurdish unrest and the war in Kurdistan, Oil concessions and oil exploration, The Rise of Ba’athism and Saddam Hussein, The USSR-Iraq Treaty of Friendship in 1972, Iran-Iraq relations.

Great Britain’s intimate involvement with the foundation of the state of Iraq and with the early direction of its government makes the National Archives at Kew the single major source for understanding the processes which formed the modern state and its politics. It is through the documents filed here that the reader can form an accurate impression of the British administrators, their concerns, their views of Iraq and the Iraqis and their reasons for devising policies that were to have a marked effect on the course of Iraqi political history long after British influence had come to an end.

The files reproduced in this collection have been selected on the basis of the light they can throw on routine policy-making, as well as on key episodes and developments in the political history of Iraq and its relationship with Great Britain. The editorial role has been confined to the selection of subject files which together form a comprehensive and multi-faceted picture of Iraq’s political history. The files themselves are reproduced in their entirety, including all the comments, annotations and revisions made by the officials through whose hands they passed, giving the reader the opportunity to assess how British policy was made and often revised to deal with changing circumstances.

From the National Archives at Kew, UK. Selected by Dr. Charles Tripp, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, these documents cover the political and administrative history of the modern state which has emerged from the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia. This database offers conference reports, ministerial memos and diplomatic dispatches, as well as official letters of correspondence from regional leaders, press releases and arms deal reports. This collection will also appeal to those with an interest in economics, politics and peace studies.

[taken from the introduction by Professor Charles Tripp, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Trial until 17 July: Perlego (ebooks)

We are delighted to announce that Oxford readers now have trial access to Perlego until 17 July.

Perlego contains 300,000 ebook titles across a broad range of subjects. This includes all of Wiley and Pearson titles. You may browse by subject, topic, curated reading list or publisher.

The History section includes just under 24,000 ebooks, the vast majority being popular history but it also includes works by e.g. Prof Lyndal Roper, Diarmaid MacCulloch, and many more eminent scholars.

Users can browse the full collection to identify titles of interest without creating an account at www.perlego.com.

However, to access the full-text, users need to create their own Perlego account. To set this up, go to Databases A-Z and find Perlego.

Then, click on the link to WebLearn to find the access code and the link to the platform. A registration form will be generated. Use your ox.ac.uk email address and the access code to set up your account. Once this is done, in future,  you can go to Perlego at perlego.com and just login in with your email address.

Please send feedback to isabel.holowaty@bodleian.ox.ac.uk or to hilla.wait@bodleian.ox.ac.uk

For more information on Perlego: have a look at the YouTube tutorial

We only have a one month trial so please make good use of the resource!

Library update 21/5: etextbooks, Numérique Premium trial, Sources Chrétiennes Online

In today’s update, we have news of some etextbook availability, a trial of French ebooks and a new purchase of interest to church historians.

Use SSO for remote access as usual.

VitalSource is a supplier of ebooks and etextbooks to individuals. https://www.vitalsource.com/
They are offering up to 7 free rental for UK students and academics until the end of June due to the pandemic on their Bookshelf site, as long as you sign up with your .ox.ac.uk address. Bookshelf is a sub-set of VitalSource’s complete content. Records are NOT on SOLO.

Kortext (access until June 30, 2020). Another etextbook supplier. Includes The Oxford World Classics series and a selection of other e-books and e-textbooks. Access and SOLO loading is still in process. Not hugely useful for history, compared to other subjects, but it includes e.g. E. Said’s Culture and Imperialism or P. Marshall’s Reformation England 1480-1642. Records in SOLO will be very brief and not very accurate! Best to do a keyword search.

Numérique Premium (trial until 12/6): a French Humanities e-book collection. It contains about 1,500 French-language Humanities ebooks. Access the resource via SOLO but note that records of individual ebooks are NOT on SOLO. Let Isabel Holowaty know if this is useful.

Sources Chrétiennes Online (SCO), purchased by Classics and Theology colleagues. Access the resource via SOLO. The series consists of critical editions of Christian texts in Greek and Latin, but also in oriental languages, such as Syriac, Armenian and Georgian, dating from the first 1,400 years of the Church, accompanied by a French translation as well as an introduction and notes.

Trial until 30 June: Past Masters (trial of selected collections)

[re-blogged from University of Oxford eResources blog post]

Past Masters – Humanities Full Text Works is a collection of primary-source full-text humanities databases. Past Masters titles are usually comprised of the complete works of individual authors.

Trials of the following collections are running until 30 June 2020, many of which are of interest to historians also. Use SSO for remote access. > Access the trial

Bello: Obras Completas
Benjamin: Gesamtwerk
Browning: Works
Chawton House Memoirs
Chawton House Travel Writings
Chawton House Women’s Novels
Dilthey: Gesammelte Werke und Briefe
Early Franciscans
Edgeworth: Works
Female Gothic
Franciscan Philosophy
Friars Minor Rules Commentaries
Gaskell: Works
Goethes Werke
Grimm: Briefwechsel
Inchbald: Diaries
Lamb: Works
Lytton: Correspondence
Manley: Selected Works
Martineau: British Empire
Martineau: British History
Martineau: Collected Letters
Montesquieu: Œuvres Complètes
Nietzsche: Briefwechsel
Olivi: Works
Oxford Duden German Dictionary
Pickering Women’s Classics
Robinson: Works
Scheler: Gesamtwerk
Schiller: Sämtliche Werke
Shelley (Mary): Literary Lives
Silver Fork Novels
Smith, Charlotte: Works
Trollope: Novels
Weil: Oeuvres
Wharton: Unpublished Writings
Wodeham: Lectura Secunda
Women Writing Home
Women’s Sensation Fiction

Please send feedback to Hilla Wait.

Trial until 18 May 2020: Droz ebooks: Humanisme et Renaissance – Calvin

Colleagues in the Taylor Institution Library have set up trials to some online Droz French resources. Two of these will be of interest to early modern history, history of the book, intellectual history, religious history, and European history. You will need SSO for remote access. Please send feedback to isabel.holowaty@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

Humanisme et Renaissance

The Droz Humanisme et Renaissance collection offers a collection of sources and studies on Humanism (Politien, Ficin, Erasmus, Budé…), the French Reformation (Lefèvre d’Etaples, Calvin, Farel, Beza…) and the Renaissance (literary and artistic, Hieronymus Bosch or Rabelais, Ronsard or Primaticcio), as well as the medicine, science, philosophy, book history, and all forms of knowledge and human activity from the long sixteenth century, roughly from 1450 to the death of Henry IV in 1610, the threshold of the classical age.

Calvin

This portal presents all the texts by or about John Calvin which have been published by the Librairie Droz from 1960 to 2012, with an initial focus on Geneva, Calvin, and the beginnings of the French evangelical movement with Lefèvre d’Etaples and Marguerite de Navarre.

Related resources already available in Oxford:

Anti-Calvin

This database comprises the writings of French Catholics against the doctrines of John Calvin (1509-1564) and other protestant leaders. France was a major centre in the clash between Catholics and Protestants during the sixteenth century. Much of the Protestant literature was in French in the hopes of converting the French people. In response, the Catholic Church preserved its position in France with these documents. This archive includes both sixteenth-century attacks on Calvinism and Protestantism as well as defences of the Catholic doctrine.

Huguenots

This collection offers a comprehensive survey of the original writings of the French Huguenot authors, from the first stirrings of radical dissent in the 1530s through to the end of the century. The selection privileges first and foremost original writings of authors writing within France and for an exclusively French audience. Thus whereas Calvin’s Genevan writings are not included, the tracts penned by Theodore de Bèze as part of the polemic exchange during the Colloquy of Poissy (1561) do appear here.

All told the writings collected here reveal an intellectually vibrant movement, meeting unprecedented challenges and later hardship with that mixture of confidence, aggression, and resolution in the face of adversity that characterises Calvinist churches of this era throughout Europe.

Trials of three women’s history eresources

March is Women’s History month! 

Colleagues have arranged trials to three eresources on women’s history and women’s studies. Across the University many Departments are now undergoing changes to rectify historic gaps in teaching and enhance inclusivity. In this vein, these trials has been arranged as part of the Bodleian’s Changing the Narrative project (https://libguides.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/changingthenarrative).

Please send any feedback to Helen.Worrell@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

1. Women and Social Movements, International (Trial until 31 March 2020)

Through the writings of women activists, their personal letters and diaries, and the proceedings of conferences at which pivotal decisions were made, this collection lets you see how women’s social movements shaped much of the events and attitudes that have defined modern life.  This digital archive includes 150,000 pages of conference proceedings, reports of international women’s organizations, publications and web pages of women’s non-governmental organizations, and letters, diaries, and memoirs of women active internationally since the mid-nineteenth century.  It also includes photographs and videos of major events and activists in the history of women’s international social movements.

Finally, 30 essays commissioned from leading contemporary scholars explore themes illuminated by the primary documents in the archive.

2. Women’s Magazine Archive 1 & 2 (Trial until 31 March 2020)

Women’s Magazine Archive 1 provides access to the complete archives of the foremost titles of this type, including Good Housekeeping and Ladies’ Home Journal, which serve as canonical records of evolving assumptions about gender roles and cultural mores. Other titles here focus on narrower topics but deliver valuable source content for specific research areas. Parents, for example, is of particular relevance for research in the fields of children’s education, psychology, and health, as well as reflecting broader social historical trends.

Women’s Magazine Archive 2 features several of the most prominent, high-circulating, and long-running publications in this area, such as Woman’s Day and Town & Country. Collection 2 also, however, complements the first collection by including some titles focusing on more specific audiences and themes. Cosmopolitan and Seventeen, for example, are oriented towards a younger readership, while black women’s interests are represented by Essence. Women’s International Network News differs in being a more political, activist title, with an international dimension.

Topics covered these collections include family life, home economics, health, careers, fashion, culture, and many more; this material serves multiple research areas, from gender studies, social history, and the arts, through to education, politics, and marketing/media history.

3. Women’s Studies Archive (Trial until 6 April 2020)

As a comprehensive academic-level archival resource, Women’s Studies Archive: Issues and Identities will focus on the social, political, and professional achievements of women throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century. Along with providing a closer look at some of the pioneers of women’s movements, this collection offers scholars a deep dive into the issues that have affected women and the many contributions they have made to society.

Not all of these are affordable, so please consider which should be prioritised and why and send your feedback to Helen.Worrell@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

While you are here, check out our

Trial until 25 March: British Library Newspapers, Part V (1746-1950)

We are currently running a trial until 25 March for British Library Newspapers, Part V (1746-1950). The Bodleian Libraries already have access to British Library Newspapers, Parts I-IV. (1732-1950).

Part V gives access to 36 regional newspapers from England and Scotland. They include, for instance:

  • Burnley Express 1877-1904
  • Cambridge Chronicle and Journal 1813-1871
  • Cheltenham Looker-On 1836-1920
  • Coventry Herald 1824-1911
  • The Elgin Courant, and Morayshire Advertiser 1839-1862
  • Fife Herald 1833-1885
  • The Gloucester Journal 1837-1950
  • The Hampshire Chronicle 1772-1830
  • The Hereford Times 1832-1899
  • Inverness Courier 1817-1892
  • Leicester Journal 1810-1881
  • The Lichfield Mercury 1883-1950
  • Manchester Mercury 1752-1830
  • Sherborne Mercury 1789-1867
  • Shields Daily Gazette 1855-1904
  • The Southern Reporter [Selkirk] 1863-1925
  • Sussex Advertiser 1746-1878
  • Western Daily Press [Bristol] 1858-1949
  • The Whitstable Times and Herne Bay Herald 1867-1904
  • Worcestershire Chronicle 1838-1903

Content in British Library Newspapers Part I-V is also available in British Newspaper Archive. You can search for free, but need a personal subscription to read the content.

Researchers are now invited to provide feedback by emailing isabel.holowaty@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

While you are here…

Trial until 25 March: Retronews

We are inviting researchers interested in French historical newspapers to trial Retronews.

Retronews is a new archive offered by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and provides access to 600 French news titles published between 1631 and 1950.  Some of these newspapers used to be freely available on Gallica but can now only be accessed through Retronews.

Just over half of the titles are published in Paris with the rest being regional French titles and 5 from Algeria. Titles include: Le Matin (1884-1944), Le Petit Parisien (1876-1944), Le Temps (1861-1942), Gazette nationale ou le Monitor universel (1789-1901).

Different kinds of keyword search are offered. Extra features include filtering by theme, historical period and place of publication. The database comes with three introductory tutorials.

We don’t yet know when the trial expires, but please send feedback to Isabel Holowaty (isabel.holowaty@bodleian.ox.ac.uk) and Nick Hearn (nick.hearn@bodleian.ox.ac.uk).

Trial until 20 March: South Asian Newspapers : Historical newspapers from South Asia

Colleagues have arranged trial access to Readex’s South Asian Newspapers : Historical newspapers from South Asia.

This resource provides online access to a select group of South Asian newspapers from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The majority of the newspapers are from India with one from Pakistan and one from Sri Lanka. The titles include:

  • Amrita Bazar Patrika (Calcutta) 1895-1922
  • Bankura Darpana (Bankura, India) 1903-1908
  • Madras Mail (Madras) 1868-1889
  • Kayasare Hinda (Bombay) 1882-1922
  • Pioneer (Allahabad, India)1865-1903
  • Tribune (Lahore, Pakistan) 1881-1922
  • Ceylon Observer (Sri Lanka) 1864-1922

This resource can be accessed via SOLO and Databases A-Z.

Please send feedback to emma.mathieson@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.