By Jutta Seibert

Elmer R. Kottcamp, Weather
Vane, c. 1941, watercolor and
graphite on paper, 43.9 x 31 cm.
Courtesy of the National
Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Visual representations of data help us understand numbers and their relationships with each other at their best, at their worst they misrepresent and distort what they represent. In our data-driven world visual literacy has become a critical component of information literacy. Thus, it should come as no surprise that this year the Library included a data visualization competition in its Love Data Week lineup.

Humans are remarkable adept at creating and understanding visual representations of data. While experts are divided on whether or not to count paleolithic cave drawings as early examples of data visualization, there is general consensus that maps are visual data communication tools. The information encoded on maps can be highly complex but nevertheless easy to grasp given a basic familiarity with coding conventions for maps. Some of these conventions are so ubiquitous that they are at times considered universal. This may be true today, but visual codes have changed over time. The four cardinal points are an interesting case in point. While we may consider the placement of the North at the top of a map as universal, not all maps follow this convention: Some Medieval European maps show East, where Jerusalem was situated, at the top of the map, Islamic maps often show the South at the top, and last, but not least, modern GIS systems show the travel goal and not one of the cardinal directions at the top.

Modern computing technology has put a wide range of data visualization tools at our fingertips. We are only a few clicks away from transforming data points on a spreadsheet into picture-perfect pie charts, bar graphs, tree maps, and scatter plots. In fact, creating visualizations is generally easier than understanding some of them. There is evidence that many data visualizations produced today are either nonsensical, pedestrian, or outrightly misleading. Numerous websites and publications are dedicated to the misrepresentation and distortion of data through visualizations. Similarly, a range of academic journals are dedicated to the topic of data visualization in various fields ranging from business to science, and the humanities. In a world where enormous amounts of data are continuously collected, both intentionally and unintentionally, data analysis and data communication are considered basic skills in many professions. Today, visual and data literacy are important components of basic information literacy.

Minard, Charles Joseph. “Representation of successive human loss during the Russia campaign of the French Army, 1812-1813.” Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Truly great data visualizations are rare. They tell a story and focus our attention. No specialized data analysis training is needed to understand their message. One of the most widely referenced examples is Charles Joseph Minard’s visualization of the human loss suffered by the French Army during the 1812-13 invasion of Russia and subsequent retreat. Minard’s mash-up of a map and flowchart poignantly shows the stark realities of human loss caused by war. Edward Tufte, a widely respected authority on visualizations and author of multiple works on the topic, calls it “the best statistical graphic ever drawn” on his website.

Explore our recommended reading list below if you are interested in the topic and join us on Friday, February 16 at 10 a.m. for Falvey’s first Data Visualization Competition awards ceremony.

Recommended Readings and Websites

• Cairo, Alberto. How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter About Visual Information. New York: Norton, 2019.
• Emery, John. “Top Five: Ways to Mislead with Data Visualizations.” phData, February 17, 2020. https://www.phdata.io/blog/top-five-ways-mislead-data-visualization/
• Funkhauser, A. Gray. “Historical Development of the Graphical Representation of Statistical Data.” Osiris 3 (1937): 269-404. https://www.jstor.org/stable/301591
• Lisnic, Maxim. “How People Actually Lie With charts. Visualization Design Lab, April 17, 2023. https://vdl.sci.utah.edu/blog/2023/04/17/misleading/
• Mackinlay, Jock D., and Kevin Winslow. “Designing Great Visualizations.” Tableau whitepaper. https://www.tableau.com/sites/default/files/2022-09/designing_great_visualizations.pdf
• Thompson, Clive. “The Surprising History of the Infographic.” Smithsonian Magazine, July 2016. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/surprising-history-infographic-180959563/
• Tufte, Edward R. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. 2nd ed. Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press, 2002.
• Wainer, Howard. Picturing the Uncertain World: How to Understand, Communicate, and Control Uncertainty Through Graphical Display. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
• Yau, Nathan. Data Points: Visualization That Means Something. Indianapolis: Wiley, 2013.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

Looking for news from Ireland? We’ve got you covered. Falvey Library has arranged trial access to Irish Newspaper Archives, a collection of over 200 current and historical newspapers covering all Irish counties. The Archives are updated daily and you can expect to read today’s issues of The Belfast Telegraph, The Corkman, The Donegal News, the Irish Independent, the Tipperary Star, and many other newspapers from Ireland and Northern Ireland whenever you log on. Also available are the archives of a long list of since defunct newspapers, such as The Freeman’s Journal (1763-1924), the Nation (1842-1897), and Punch (1844-1925). Those of our readers who have consulted the Irish Radical Newspapers collection in the past will be familiar with the search interface and collection platform.

Trial access to the Irish Newspaper Archives will be available until October 20. We noticed that the Archives’ response times are slow and ask for your patience. Let us know if you would like to recommend the Archives for the Library’s permanent collection.

Related resources in the Falvey collections:

• Irish studies research guide
• The Irish Times (ProQuest Historical Newspapers)
  Presents a complete archive of the Irish Times back to 1859 (except for the most recent two years) and the Weekly Irish Times (1876-1958).
• Irish newspapers in Falvey’s Digital Library
  Available titles include The Free State, The Irish Felon, The Irish People, The Irish Tribune, The Irish Worker and People’s Advocate, The Irishman, The United Irishman, and The Waterford Chronicle.
• Irish newspapers on microfilm in the Falvey collection
  Titles available include: An-Phoblacht/The Republic, Belfast News-letter, Dublin News, Evening Freeman, Evening Telegraph, Freeman’s Journal, Irish Freedom, Irish Times, Irish Tribune, Irishman, Pilot, The Peasant, United Irishman, and The Weekly Nation.
• The Irish Press
  A weekly newspaper dedicated to Irish nationalism for an Irish American audience. It was founded by Joseph McGarrity and published in Philadelphia from 1918 to 1922.
• Radical Newspapers, 1886-1993 (Irish Newspaper Archives)
  Digital archives of more than 100 newspapers, bulletins, and pamphlets covering a broad sweep of nationalist, republican, feminist, and socialist publications.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

On Monday, June 19, the Villanova community, along with the United States, commemorates Juneteenth. The University added Juneteenth to its list of holidays in 2020 to allow staff, faculty, and students to observe this important day in the nation’s history with family and friends.

A portmanteau of the words June and nineteenth, Juneteenth references June 19, 1865, the day on which the news that all slaves are free reached Galveston, Texas. The Civil War had been effectively over for more than two months, but the news had not yet reached the far corners of the country. The following year African Americans in Texas began celebrating the end of slavery on June 19 of every year.

Juneteenth is also known as Emancipation Day, Freedom Day, (Black) Independence Day, and Jubilee Day.

Emancipation Day Celebration band, June 19, 1900, Texas. University of North Texas Libraries.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Not unexpectedly Texas was the first state to officially recognize Juneteenth as a holiday, first by proclamation in 1937 followed by legislation in 1979. Other states followed suit, among them Pennsylvania in 2019. On June 17, 2020, President Joseph Biden elevated Juneteenth to a federal holiday, one of only eleven, by signing the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law.

The University’s commitment to race and justice goes well beyond recognizing Juneteenth as an important holiday. In 2020 Aequitas, the Presidential Task Force on Race began to assess the racial climate on campus. One of the measures proposed by the task force was a university-wide required course on race and justice, which is currently piloted on campus.

Another noteworthy initiative is the Rooted Project that aims to explore the University’s historical ties to slavery, segregation, and institutionalized racism, among others, and to educate the community about issues of race and justice.

Join Falvey staff in commemorating and celebrating this special day!

For those still looking for an inspiring read for this summer, here are some suggestions:

• Strait, Kevin Michael Angelo, and Kinshasha Conwill. Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2023.
  Unfortunately, the Library’s copy is already checked out but consider a ticket for the exhibition of the same name at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
• Etoke, Nathalie. Black Existential Freedom. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023.
  “Black Existential Freedom looks at the ways in which Black cultural productions reflect a constant struggle for freedom and a refusal to surrender to the destructive forces of dehumanization.”
• Manjapra, Kris. Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation. New York: Scribner, 2022.
  “Black Ghost of Empire focuses on emancipation and how this opportunity to make right further codified the racial caste system-instead of obliterating it.” In case you missed it, Manjapra recently spoke on campus.
• Davis, Thulani. The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.
  “Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction by tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South.”
• Ray, Victor. On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters and Why You Should Care. New York: Random House, 2022.
• Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. 25th anniversary ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022.
  “The Racial Contract puts classic Western social contract theory, deadpan, to extraordinary radical use. With a sweeping look at the European expansionism and racism of the last five hundred years, Charles W. Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged ‘contract’ has shaped a system of global European domination.”
• Givens, Terri E. The Roots of Racism: The Politics of White Supremacy in the US and Europe. Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022.
• DeSalle, Rob, and Ian Tattersall. Understanding Race. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr, and Andrew S. Curran. Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-century Invention of Race. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2022.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Library.

By Jutta Seibert

At long last, Love Data Week is here! Every year the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, better known as ICPSR, hosts Love Data Week in February and invites the academic community to adopt datasets to show their love for data-driven research.

At its core, ICPSR is a data archive that offers a range of value-added services such as online analysis, educational programs, and data management tools. Students, faculty, and staff associated with Villanova University have access to the complete menu of services and archived datasets. Questions regarding ICPSR should be directed to the University’s official ICPSR representative, Social Sciences Librarian Nicole Daly.

The sheer size of the archive is difficult to grasp for anyone not familiar with ICPSR. However, finding relevant data is amazingly easy. Search terms are matched not just to variables or dataset descriptions but also to data-related publications. Most important of all, ICPSR is not just for political scientists and sociologists, as its name may imply; humanists and historians are among the scholars who deposit qualitative as well as quantitative data. ICPSR hosts self-published replication data sets through openICPSR. Keep this in mind for the next time a research grant requires you to share your data for replication purposes.

To show my love of data I adopted the Berry Slave Value Database. Choosing one dataset from the multitude of data available on the topic of slavery was not easy. So many options and so little time. In the end it came down to a choice between Dr. Berry’s dataset, which offered historical sale and appraisal prices covering the years 1797 through 1865 from ten U.S. states, and the data archived by Drs. Fogel and Engerman, which include historical sale and appraisal prices covering the years 1775 through 1865 from eight southern states. I chose to adopt Dr. Berry’s dataset, which was submitted through the OpenICPSR program. OpenICPSR datasets can only be analyzed by downloading them from ICPSR into statistical software, whereas many of the ICPSR curated datasets can be analyzed online on the ICPSR website. The Berry Slave Value Database features research data that Dr. Berry collected for her monograph The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, From Womb to Grave, In the Building of a Nation, which is available at Falvey in print as well as electronically.

Falvey staff invites you to take a closer look at what ICPSR has to offer and to adopt a dataset this week whether you are a humanist or a social scientist. For more information about ICPSR and some of the other data resources Falvey offers, join us throughout the week in one of our lunch workshops. Join us online using the hashtag #LoveData23 to see how institutions around the world are celebrating Love Data 23.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

Falvey currently offers trial access to the Art & Architecture ePortal (A&AePortal), an authoritative source of academic art and architecture books. Electronic access to art, art history, and architecture monographs and journals is a somewhat recent development. Reproduction quality of image and copyright permissions were among the major drivers for this delay. Technological changes in recent years have resulted in electronic image quality that is often superior to that in print media. Covid-19 access restrictions to print collections accelerated and incentivized the transition to e-books in art and art history.

A&AePortal is a great example of a high-quality and innovative e-book collection in this discipline. It features a collection of authoritative works on art and architecture including artist monographs, surveys, museum catalogs, and catalogues raisonnés. Most works are part of the catalog of Yale University Press publications complemented by selected books from other highly regarded university and museum presses including electronic access to the acclaimed The Image of the Black in Western Art series edited by Bindman, Gates, and Dalton and published by Belknap Press.

Falvey owns many of the works in print but some of these critical works have been lost or damaged over the years and are currently out of print. Online access offers the convenience of easy access to often oversized and weighty books. In some cases black and white images that appeared in the print publications have been replaced with high-quality color copies. The portal features a searchable image archive, citation and annotation tools, as well as a personal book shelf.

Library staff invites you to explore the A&AePortal. Trial access to the collection will end on December 30th. We are looking forward to your comments.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

This fall, Ugegbe: Jọnalụ Ụwandịigbo joined a small group of peer-reviewed academic journals published and hosted by Falvey Library. Ugegbe is published entirely in the Igbo language, one of the major languages spoken in Nigeria. It is also the only peer-reviewed journal published in Igbo and, thus, a powerful symbol of Igbo vibrance, despite the much debated UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) prediction that Igbo is a dying language. Falvey Library and its staff are proud to support this new open access publishing project, which reflects the Library’s values of openness, inclusion, and excellence.

Why did Villanova University become the home of Ugegbe? First of all, one of the editors of the journal is Chiji Akọma, Chair of the Global Interdisciplinary Studies Department and Professor of English at Villanova. Second, while Ugegbe is in many ways unique, it is not uncommon for academic journals in African languages to be published or hosted in the diaspora. The Global South remains an unequal partner in global scholarly communication networks. Factors that impinge on access include the cost of journal subscriptions, article publication fees imposed on authors, the dominance of a few languages in global research communities, and membership on editorial boards of academic journals.

So why publish an academic journal in Igbo? Given the sheer numbers of native Igbo speakers worldwide – roughly 30 million – the question should really be: Why not publish a journal in Igbo? There is ample evidence of the cognitive value of mother tongue instruction especially at the elementary and secondary levels. Yet youth in many countries, especially those with histories of colonial conquest, are expected to learn in languages other than their native tongues. Language builds community, carries cultural values, and is in many ways fundamental to one’s identity. Many nations recognize the value of instruction in the native tongue but lack the means to extend native language instruction to the university level. Ugegbe is a vital building block to create a research level platform for Igbo. But equally important, as Akọma put it, “Ugegbe is premised on the promotion of indigenous languages as complete and legitimate vehicles for communicating the cultural and intellectual production systems of these communities.”

Many Villanovans may not be aware that they are familiar with the work of one or more writers whose native tongue is Igbo but who write in English: Chinua Achebe wrote the arguably most widely read and studied African novel, Things Fall Apart (1958). He also wrote a short essay about the role of English in African literature, “English and the African Writer” (Transition 75/76 (1997): 342-49). Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Genius Grant, is best known for her acclaimed novel Americanah (2013), which won the National Book Critics Circle award.

Drafting this post, I looked for examples of academic journals published in African languages and was surprised how difficult an endeavor this turned out to be. Admittedly, some African languages are spoken by comparatively small populations. However, Igbo boasts roughly 30 million native speakers, about the same number as all native speakers of all Scandinavian languages put together. I soon came to realize that African languages that were actively used in scholarly communication were generally those that held “official language” status in an African country, such as Amharic in Ethiopia and Swahili in Tanzania. I found a few examples through African Journals Online (AJO). Nevertheless, the vast majority of African journals hosted on AJO is published in English, including 257 Nigerian academic journals. Academic journals in a few African languages, such as Amharic and Swahili, do exist, but they are very rare gems indeed.

Falvey’s journal hosting program currently encompasses eight academic journals. The program dates back to 2010 and utilizes the Open Journal System (OJS) platform, a free journal publishing software, created and distributed by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP). The contents of these journals can be freely accessed from anywhere. The driving force behind PKP and OJS is John Willinsky. OJS lays claim to being “the most widely used open source journal publishing platform in existence, with over 25,000 journals using it worldwide.” PKP also offers open source monograph and open conference publishing software. Reasons for making academic journals freely available online (open access model) are generally the same as those given for publishing open access articles in traditional journals: removing access hurdles, preserving academic freedom, increasing the diversity of participants in scholarly communications networks, and reducing market pressures on academic niche journals.

Further Reading

• Bgoya, Walter, and Mary Jay. “Publishing in Africa from Independence to the Present Day.” Research in African Literatures 44, no. 2 (2013): 17–34. https://doi-org.ezp1.villanova.edu/10.2979/reseafrilite.44.2.17
• Madiba, Mbulungeni. “Language and Academic Achievement: Perspectives on the Potential Role of Indigenous African Languages as a Lingua Academica.” Per Linguam 28, no. 2 (2012). https://doi.org/10.5785/28-2-528
• Ondari-Okemwa, E. (2007). Scholarly publishing in sub-Saharan Africa in the twenty-first century: Challenges and opportunities. First Monday, 12(10). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v12i10.1966
• Ouedraogo, Rakissouiligri Mathieu. “The Use of African Languages in Educational Systems in Africa.” IICBA Newsletter 4, no. 4 (December 2002). https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000231594.locale=en
• Ouane, Adama, and Christine Glanz. Why and How Africa Should Invest in African Languages and Multilingual Education: An Evidence- and Practice-based Policy Advocacy Brief. Hamburg: UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, 2010. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED540509.pdf
• Nwaubani, Adaobi Tricia. “’We Spoke English to Set Ourselves Apart’: How I Rediscovered my Mother Tongue.” The Guardian, March 14, 2019. Accessed October 21, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/mar/14/we-spoke-english-to-set-ourselves-apart-nigeria-childhood-igbo-language
• Willinsky, John. Copyright’s Broken Promise: How to Restore the Law’s Ability to Promote the Progress of Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2023.
  https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/106529

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

Villanova faculty members, students, and staff who are interested in Japanese society, culture, and politics can currently explore the archive of the Japan Times, the longest running Japanese newspaper in English language. Trial access to the archive will be available until Aug. 5.

Motosado Zumoto launched the Japan Times in March of 1897 and served as its founding editor. His goal was to promote Japanese perspectives and values among Westerners and to give Japanese people the opportunity to read and discuss local and international news in English. Japanese business people, students, and foreign residents represented the bulk of the newspaper’s audience. While the Japan Times styled itself as an independent daily, there was always a measure of government influence. Prince Ito Hirobumi, a four-time prime minister of Japan, financed the paper for some time. In 1933, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs appointed Hitoshi Ashida, former ministry official, as chief editor, reducing the Times to an outlet for Imperial Japanese government propaganda.

Also included in this database is The Japan Advertiser, a competing newspaper which eventually merged with the Japan Times. The Advertiser was written by and for missionaries, diplomats, merchants, and journalists who were based in Japan. Search results can be limited by imperial period. The archive includes extras and supplements as well as images and ads. The most recent issues currently available in the archive are from 2021.

A link to the collection will be available on the Databases A-Z list until the trial ends on Aug. 5.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

You asked for it and we delivered: Falvey recently acquired permanent access to the digital archive of UK Parliamentary Papers. The archive comprises documents from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, as well as some earlier papers. The twenty-first century collection is not available to the Villanova community, but some of the papers from this period are freely available through the UK’s Parliamentary Archives.

The House of Parliament, as seen from Lambeth.
Image taken from “The Earth and Its Inhabitants. Europe. Vol. 4, The British Isles” by Élisée Reclus. New York: Appleton and Co., 1881, p. 184. Courtesy of Hathi Trust.

Research applications are endless given the scope of the archive. Its contents hold wide appeal for scholars from a range of disciplines, including political science, history, and Irish studies. They cover a vast sweep of events tracing the political discourse on matters large and small. Expect to find sessional papers, acts, bills, agreements, public petitions, and reports among the archived documents. Among the many issues and events covered figure universal suffrage, the slave trade and its abolition, the poor laws, child labor, mandatory vaccination, a long list of wars, national trade statistics on products such as cotton, coffee, tea, sugar, timber, and rubber, government funded expeditions such as the ill-fated arctic expedition led by Sir John Franklin, British overseas colonies and their struggles for independence, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland to name just a few topics.

The archive offers an advanced search interface and search facets that will narrow results by date, document type, Parliament chamber, and subject. Document features, such as maps, plans, tables, graphs, and illustrations, are indexed and easy to identify. Documents can be downloaded in PDF format.

This archive does not generate document citations, but the Details view includes common and Cockton titles, date, series, document number, and a permalink; in short, all the necessary elements. I am including below a selection of documents that illustrate the broad sweep of archival sources included in this archive.

Let us know if you have any further questions or visit the ProQuest Guide to UK Parliamentary Papers. Access to the archive is provided via the Databases A-Z list and the Library’s catalog.

A Sampling of Documents from the UK Parliamentary Papers Archive

• The Belfast Agreement: An Agreement Reached at the Multi-Party Talks on Northern Ireland. Command Papers 3883, 1997/98.
  Better known as Good Friday Agreement.
• Children’s Employment Commission. First Report of the Commissioners. Mines. London: William Clowes and Sons, 1842.
• Select Committee on State of Children Employed in Manufactories of United Kingdom. Report of the Minutes of Evidence. House of Commons Papers 397, 1816.
• Reports from Protectors of Slaves in Colonies of Demerara, Berbice, Trinidad, St. Lucia, Cape of Good Hope and Mauritius. House of Commons Papers 262, 1830-31.
• Treaties between Great Britain and Portugal, France, Russia, Netherlands, Sardinia, Austria, Prussia, United States of America, and Saxony, 1815, on Territories, Commerce, and Slave Trade (Class B.). House of Commons Papers 2, 1816.
• Bill to prevent Spreading of Infection of Small-Pox (as amended by Committee). Bills and Acts 287, 1808.
• Vaccination Acts (repeal). A Bill to Repeal the Vaccination Acts. Bills and Acts 204, 1911.
• Papers relating to Blockade of Ports of Confederate State. Command Papers 2931, 1862.
• Account of Quantity of Refined Sugar and Sugar Candy imported into United Kingdom, 1848-68 […]. House of Commons Papers 191, 1868-69.
• Bill for Relief of H.M. Roman Catholic Subjects (as amended by Committee). Bills and Acts 104, 1829.
• An Act for making a Railway from London to Southampton. [25th July 1834.] Bills and Acts 3, 1834.

Illustration of the work performed by Margaret Hipps, age seventeen, in a UK coal mine.
Taken from “Children’s Employment Commission. First Report of the Commissioners. Mines,”
published in London by William Clowes and Sons in 1842 (fig. 19, p. 95). UK Parliamentary Papers (ProQuest)

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

Stamp commemorating
the 50th anniversary of Izvestiia.

Falvey Library recently acquired the complete digital archive of Izvestiia (Известия) from East View. Next to the Pravda, Izvestiia is likely the most widely recognized newspaper in Russia. In print since 1917, it was once the official organ of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR but has changed hands several times since the collapse of the Union. It remains a popular and widely respected news source in Russia today.

The Izvestiia digital archive offers the Villanova community a unique opportunity to explore life in the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. It goes without saying that this is a Russian language archive. The search interface includes a virtual keyboard to facilitate full text searching using the Cyrillic alphabet. A standard Western keyboard can be used to enter search terms in transliterated (Romanized) Russian. Alternatively, one can also browse the archive by date. A small selection of Izvestiia articles is available in The Current Digest of the Russian Press for those looking for translations, but only back to 1949 and in some cases only in condensed format and always without illustrations. Note that The Current Digest typically lags a week or two behind actual events due to the logistics of selecting and translating news.

Izvestiia, January 24, 1924.

The coverage of the 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis illustrates well the different opportunities presented by these two news archives. Izvestiia journalists covered the events extensively as they unfolded. Indeed, the paper’s no holds barred coverage, which included many explicit images, led to the ouster of its editor-in-chief Raf Shakirov. Scholars looking for translations will find a sparse selection in The Current Digest issue from September 29 of the same year, published four weeks after events started to unfold. None of the controversial images published in Izvestiia are available through The Current Digest. On the plus side, The Current Digest brings together content from a wide range of Russian news sources in translation.

East View offers a well-designed search interface which can be used to explore a single as well as multiple archives simultaneously. I already mentioned the virtual keyboard that facilitates searching in writing systems other than the Latin alphabet. Available alphabets include old Russian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian. The advanced search interface presents typical search features, including date limits and author and publication title search fields. Results can be sorted by publication date, relevancy, publication source, article title, word count, and author if they are indexed. The search results page includes an Excerpts toggle that reveals text excerpts with highlighted search terms for each result.

Articles of interest can be read online in their original formatting, downloaded as pdf files, or printed directly. Available citations in MLA, APA, and Chicago style formatting include persistent URLs which can be readily shared with others. Note that citation formatting needs to be reviewed as author names and article titles are often missing. For example, East View offers the following Chicago style citation for the article “Russia’s Far East Dilemma” by Natasha Doff, which appeared in the Moscow News on August 21, 2012:

“Page 1” Moscow News. 2012. https://dlib.eastview.com/browse/doc/72935691.

Readers can easily move from reading a single article to browsing the complete issue of a publication page by page.

East View search interface.

Unfortunately, the Izvestiia digital archive is updated only once a year. Currently, the archive includes content up to the end of December 2021. 2022 issues will be loaded in March or April of next year. A link to the archive can be found on the Library’s Databases A-Z list, in the catalog, and on the Russian area studies research guide.

Russian news sources available through Falvey Library

• Izvestiia Digital Archive, 1917- (East View)
  Offers digital access to one of the longest running Russian newspapers. The archive covers the Soviet era in its entirety as well as the collapse of the Union and the Russian Federation. Yearly updates are added in the spring of the following year.
• The Current Digest of the Russian Press, 1949- (East View)
  Presents weekly selections of Russian-language press materials, translated into English.
• Moscow News Digital Archive, 1930-2014 (East View)
  Offers access to the contents of the longest running English-language newspaper published in Russia.
• Imperial Russian Newspapers (East View)
  Presents open access to selected Russian newspapers published between 1782 and 1917.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

AMODDO, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Falvey Library expanded its history reference collection with the addition of The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History published under the umbrella of the Oxford Research Encyclopedias (ORE) project by Oxford University Press. The collection currently consists of over 450 peer-reviewed essays written by recognized experts in the field. Essays are regularly updated, and new content is continuously added to the online platform. Thomas Spear, Professor Emeritus of African History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, serves as the editor in chief of the African History encyclopedia project. Scholars can search across 25 subject encyclopedias hosted on the platform or focus their search on The Encyclopedia of African History. The University currently has access to ten out of 25 encyclopedias including American, Latin American, and Asian history. A small selection of essays from all encyclopedias is freely accessible online.

For the longest time African history has been neglected by publishers. The few encyclopedias with a focus on Africa which have been published in recent decades were limited in scope. ORE offers a refreshing departure with its broad interdisciplinary approach. Essays included in The Encyclopedia of African History range from “Africa in the World: History and Historiography” by Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia to “The Zanzibar Revolution and Its Aftermath” by G. Thomas Burgess. Essays such as “Comics in Colonial Africa” by Christophe Cassiau-Haurie and “Football in Lusophone Africa” by Nuno Domingos illustrate the broad scope of the project. The shared ORE platform facilitates discovery of related content in other encyclopedias. Pertinent examples include “Colonial Rule and Its Political Legacies in Africa” by Amanda Lea Robinson and “Land Grabs: The Politics of the Land Rush Across Africa” by Pauline Peters from The Encyclopedia of Politics and “The Black Atlantic and the African Diaspora” by Walter C. Rucker and “Ancient Egyptian Religion” by Korshi Dosoo in The Encyclopedia of Religion.

While distinctly academic in nature, essays are written in a style that makes them accessible to undergraduates and mature scholars alike. Essays generally begin with a summary before offering a comprehensive overview of the topic together with its historiography. They also identify available primary sources and digital archives. Bibliographies include links to the Falvey collections. New essays are added monthly.

The Library’s Databases A-Z list includes a listing for Oxford Research Encyclopedias. Direct access to The Encyclopedia of African History is also available via the Library’s catalog.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.