Volume V, Issue 1
September 2008

COMPASS

New Directions at Falvey

African American studies, Full text dissertations, Foreign broadcasts (CIA) and Spanish language journals

Oxford African American Studies Center: The database provides students and scholars online access to the finest reference resources in African American studies. AASC features the new Encyclopedia of African American History 1619-1895 ; Black Women in America and the highly acclaimed Africana, a five-volume history of the African and African American experience. The Center also includes the African American National Biography project (estimated at 8 volumes) and the Encyclopedia of African American Art and Architecture. In addition to these major reference works, AASC offers other key resources from Oxford's reference program, including the Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature and selected articles from other reference works. Link to this collection through the library home page under Databases A to Z.
-- Sue Ottignon

Dissertations & Theses Full Text: A comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses with over 2.4 million dissertations and theses from around the world. Each dissertation published since July 1980 includes a 350-word abstract written by the author. Master’s theses published since 1988 include 150-word abstracts. Full text is available from 1997, and bibliographic citations are available for dissertations dating from 1637. More than 65,000 new citations are added to the database every year. Where available, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses provides previews of dissertations and theses. In addition, nearly one million are available for download in PDF format. (Digital dissertations and theses are archived as submitted by the degree-granting institution.) Available alphabetically under Databases A to Z.
-- Sue Ottignon

Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports: Now available through the library home page is the United States' principal record of political and historical open source intelligence. The digital edition of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports, covering 1974-1996, provides perspectives of more than 100 countries outside the U.S., featuring transcripts of foreign news broadcasts, translated into English, from materials selected by the Central Intelligence Agency for distribution to U.S. policymakers and security analysts.

The first part of this historical archive to become available features the Middle East, Africa (Sub-Saharan) and South Asia. The full series, to be released by summer 2009, will include Latin America, East Europe, Soviet Union/Central Eurasia and Western Europe. This resource joins the growing array of electronically available primary sources collected by Falvey.

Originally a radio monitoring service during World War II, the FBIS continues to be part of the CIA but is now subsumed within Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Open Source Center (OSC), whose functions include collection, analysis and research, training and information technology management to facilitate government-wide access and use. Available alphabetically under Databases A to Z.
-- Merrill Stein

Fuente Académica, covering 1990 to the present and updated monthly, is a fulltext Spanish language database with a rapidly growing collection of scholarly journals from Latin America, Portugal and Spain. It is a multidisciplinary database that indexes articles from more than 200 Spanish language scholarly journals and magazines. Its coverage includes literature, linguistics, history, business & economics, medical sciences, political science, law, computer science, library & information sciences, philosophy and theology. Available alphabetically under Databases A to Z.
-- Sue Ottignon

(Please note that online access to Falvey's databases requires a Villanova University username and password.)