Databases

The backfile of GQ magazine, from its launch in 1931 (as Apparel Arts) to the present. One of the longest-running, most influential men's magazines, GQ expanded its initial focus on fashion to cover general men’s-interest subjects. The digital archive makes available a wealth of editorial content and photography, providing essential insights into the 20th/21st-century history of fashion, popular culture, masculinity, and society.

Includes the complete runs of the US and UK editions of Harper’s Bazaar, from 1867 to the present (US edition) and 1929-2015 (UK edition). The issues are reproduced as high-resolution color page images and supported by fully searchable text and article-level indexing. The magazine covers over 150 years of American, British, and international fashion, society, and popular culture, facilitating academic research in wide-ranging fields such as women’s studies, fashion, marketing, advertising, material culture, design, and more. It chronicles of some of the most influential work from world-renowned designers, models, photographers,stylists, and illustrators of the period.

HeinOnline: Government, Politics and Law for Canada is a fully-searchable, image-based government document and legal research database with a focus on the Canadian context.

Indexes and abstracts journal articles, books and dissertations. Covers the history of the world from 1450 to the present (excluding the United States and Canada, which are covered in America: History and Life). Over 2,300 academic historical journals from every major country, and selective coverage of hundreds of journals in the social sciences and humanities that are of interest to researchers and students of history.

Provides detailed indexing and abstracts for almost 700 periodicals covering the humanities (of which 470 are peer-reviewed), including feature articles, interviews, bibliographies, obituaries, as well as reviews of ballets, dance programs, motion pictures, musicals, radio and television programs, plays, operas, and more. Subject coverage includes archaeology, classical studies, art, performing arts, philosophy, history, music, linguistics, literature, and religion. 

JSTOR provides access to a digital archive of journals in the areas of Arts, Business, Economics, and Sciences. JSTOR includes the entire runs of these journals, from the very first issue to the volumes published a few years ago. With a small number of exceptions - the "Current Scholarship" titles - JSTOR is a backfile collection and excludes the most recent issues (as part of the terms of the agreement with the journal publishers).

McMaster's subscription to  Kanopy provides online access to over 7,000 documentary films from a range of major producers, including PBS, California Newsreel, Kino Lober, Documentary Educational Resources, and many more.  Videos can be integrated with Avenue to Learn and accessed remotely by students.  The majority of the videos are closed captioned, and clip-making is allowed.  Transcripts are also available by clicking on the 'More' tab.

Full screen mode and playback speeds can be adjusted upon clicking the "Play" button of the video.

To access additional features such as creating a Clip/Playlist, Adding comments or sharing via social media, a personal login  (eg. Google) is recommended.

Further information is available at the Kanopy Help page

Archival runs of 26 of the most influential, longest-running serial publications covering LGBT interests. Includes the pre-eminent US and UK titles – The Advocate and Gay Times, respectively. Chronicles more than six decades of the history and culture of the LGBT community. In addition to LGBT/gender/sexuality studies, this material also serves related disciplines such as sociology, political science, psychology, health, and the arts.Subject coverage includes gay rights, gay culture, gay literature/art, gay rights movement, gender identity, gender studies, lesbianism, LGBT activism, LGBT studies, social history and transgender community.

Includes materials ranging from texts, letters, periodicals, speeches, interviews, and ephemera covering LGBT political, social and cultural movements to memoirs, biographies, poetry, and works of fiction that provide insight into the lives of lesbian, gay, transgender, and bisexual individuals and the community. Content partners include the Kinsey Institute Archive and Library, Windy City Media Group, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archive, and notable LGBT publishers Alyson Books, Cleis Press, and Firebrand Books as well as mainstream trade and university publishers.

Provides indexing and abstracts for more than 190 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender-specific core periodicals, with fulltext for 120  of the most important and historically significant journals, magazines and regional newspapers. In addition, it contains more than 330 LGBT-specific core books and reference works, grey literature, including newsletters, case studies, speeches, etc. and a specialized LGBT thesaurus containing over 6,400 terms. Disciplines covered by LGBT Life include civil liberties, culture, employment, family, history, politics, psychology, religion, sociology and more.

Provides cover-to-cover online access to the prominent Canadian news magazine from its first issue in 1905 through 2015. Published weekly through much of its run, the magazine conveyed both domestic and international news and analysis on a spectrum of subjects of interest to Canadians.  Front and back covers are included, along with all advertisements, providing insight into 20th century social history.

Provides digital access ( full color page-image format) to the backfiles of the following six major US and UK men’s-interest consumer magazines covering contemporary issues and trends in history and society, masculinity, sex roles, literature, sports, fashion, popular culture, entertainment, and more.

• All Sports Illustrated Weekly (1919 to 1930)
• Argosy (1882 to 1978)
• Esquire [UK edition] (1991 to 2015)
• M: The Civilized Man (1983 to 1992)
• National Police Gazette (1845 to 1977)
• Sports Budget (1923 to 1939)

Coverage is from issue 1 through to 2015 (or the publication ceased date), with issues scanned from cover to cover, although there will be some coverage gaps (issues / pages).

Features streaming videos of films, clips and trailers from the National Film Board (NFB) collection, including NFB world-renowned documentaries, films that chronicle key moments in the lives of Canadians and works that take a stand on issues of global importance: the environment, human rights, international conflict and more. It also contains acclaimed Canadian dramatic features, documentaries, animated films, and experimental works.

An archival collection comprising the backfiles of 15 major magazines (including Newsweek), spanning areas such as current events, international relations, and public policy. The titles offer multiple perspectives on the contemporary contexts of the major events, trends, and interests in these fields throughout the twentieth century.

Provides access to thousands of sources covering a wide range of subject areas. Includes international news, legislation, company profiles, industry reports, and more. 

Contemporaneous letters and diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives provide a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. Includes 2,162 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information, and in selected cases, the actual audio voices of the immigrants.

This edition of North American Women's Drama contains 1,517 plays by 330 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. More than 30% of the plays in the collection have never been published before. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays. The collection will be of particular interest to students of feminism and for women and gender studies.

The largest collection of women's diaries and correspondence ever assembled, spanning more than 300 years, and bringing the personal experiences of some 1,325 women to researchers, students, and general readers.

Subjects include what women wore, the conditions under which they worked, what they ate, what they read, and how they amused themselves; how frequently they attended church, how they viewed their connection to God, and how they prayed; their relationships with lovers, family and friends.

Contains 150,000 pages of published letters and diaries from individuals writing from Colonial times to 1950, more than 6,000 pages of previously unpublished materials, drawn from more than 600 sources, including journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings, and 300 biographies. All age groups, life stages, and ethnicities, many geographical regions, the famous and the not so famous are represented.

The OECD iLibrary is the full-text online publications portal of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. McMaster University Libraries subscribe to all three components of the iLibrary - Books, Periodicals and Statistics. Contains international publications and statistics on a wide variety of subjects including agriculture, business, development, economics, education, employment, finance, investment, migration, science, technology, telecommunications and trade. The statistical databases allow you to build your own tables and have them exported to Excel, Beyond 20/20 and other formats.

OpenBook Publishers is a not-for-profit Social Enterprise run by academics who are committed to making high-quality research available to readers around the world. Monographs and textbooks in all subject areas are published and all books are available to read free online.

Orlando documents the part women have played in the development of literature and includes biographical and writing career entries on over 1,200 writers, more than eight hundred and fifty of them British women. It also includes selected non-British or international women writers, and British and international men, whose writing was an important, sometimes a shaping, element in a particular writing climate. Entries are contextualized with thirty thousand dated items representing events and processes (in the accounts of these writers, but also in the areas of history, science, medicine, economics, the law, and other contexts).

Major online periodical archive that makes the backfiles of periodicals in the humanities and social sciences available electronically. PAO contains over 700 journals spanning more than two centuries of content, 37 key subject areas, and multiple languages. McMaster's subscription includes PAO collections 1-10.

Produced by Coherent Digital, Policy Commons is the world’s largest database for public policy, with more than 3.2 million reports, working papers, policy briefs, data sources, and media drawn from a directory of more than 24,000 IGOs, NGOs, think tanks, and research centers. It includes over a million pages of premium content from leading publishers and restored from organizations that have disappeared.

The Policy Commons interface offers fulltext searching in addition to 3,400 topics tags and filters for document type, organization name and type, publication language, country of publication, and publication date. It also provides a searchable database of more than 16,000 policy organizations worldwide.

From music and youth culture to politics and fashion, the period from 1950 to 1975 witnessed dramatic changes in society. This primary source database traces the development from 1950s austerity to the excess of the 1970s through a range of printed and manuscript sources, visual material, ephemera and video footage including:

• Pamphlets, letters, government files, and eye witness accounts covering key events of the period.
• The renowned Social Protest Collection from University of California, Berkeley.
• Underground magazines including OZ and IT; as well as American fanzines and alternative press titles from Bowling Green State University.
• Thousands of indexed photographs depicting the people and events of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
• Ephemera and memorabilia – posters, pins and artefacts.
• A collection of carefully selected video footage that brings the sights and sounds of the period to life.
   

A collection of over 670 full-text scholarly journals in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Individual journal titles are accessible through the library catalogue (Omni).

Cross-search over 50 indexing, abstracting, and full-text databases in a range of subjects.

Indexes over 4 million doctoral dissertations and master's theses completed at colleges and universities worldwide. 

Multidisciplinary database that brings together or links to full-text for publicly available scholarly content from a number of different sources from around the world. It includes content from major subject repositories such as arXiv as well as open access journals. Content includes journal articles, pre-prints, dissertations, conference papers and reports.

Contains information on the full range of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods for the social and behavioral sciences, as well as many methods commonly used in the hard sciences, pulled from over 750 handbooks, encyclopedias, and journal articles. Supports researchers in every step of a research project, from writing a research question, choosing a method, gathering and analyzing data, to writing up and publishing the findings.

Contains over 50 million articles from over 23,000 full text journals covering many disciplines.