Databases

The largest single collection of 17th and 18th century English news media available from the British Library, this primary sources database includes more than 1,000 pamphlets, proclamations, newsbooks and newspapers from the period. The collection charts the development of the newspaper as we now know it, beginning with irregularly published transcriptions of Parliamentary debates and proclamations to coffee house newsbooks, finally arriving at newspaper in its current form.

Features the newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets and broadsheets that form the Nichols newspaper collection held at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, United Kingdom. All 296 volumes of bound material, covering the period 1672-1737 have been digitized. This collection charts the history of the development of the press in England and provides invaluable insight into 17th and 18th century England.

This primary sources collection also includes approximately 300 pamphlets and broadsheets, most prevalent in the 1672-1682 period, which illustrate the transition from early newsbook publications to newspaper format. Distributed as stand-alone publications or in combination with a newspaper, these pamphlets cover a broad range of topics such as battles, religious plots, political intrigue, royal speeches and petitions to government.

From zines, newspapers and ephemera, to oral histories, films and photographs, 1980s Culture and Society is an eclectic and multi-faceted resource compiled from archival collections housed across the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. Capturing diverse perspectives, materials produced by grassroots organizations and under-represented groups are presented alongside government records and mainstream media to showcase the key social, cultural, and political concerns of the decade such as the rise of conservatism, nuclear threat, and the AIDS crisis.

Searchable full text of full runs of newspapers specially selected by the British Library to best represent nineteenth-century Britain. This primary sources collection includes national and regional newspapers, as well as newspapers from: established country or university towns; the new industrial powerhouses of the manufacturing Midlands; and Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Special attention was paid to include newspapers that helped lead particular political or social movements such as Reform, Chartism, and Home Rule. Penny papers aimed at the working and clerical classes are also included.

This database includes periodicals published in Great Britain between 1800 and 1900, giving insight into many aspects of the 19th century life--literature and culture, empire, feminism, the history of the book, the creative and performing arts, sport and leisure, science and medicine, the professions.

Series 1: New Readerships: Women's Children's, Humor and Leisure/Sport
Series 1 charts the rapid rise of publishing in a reading culture expanding with the rise in literary and leisure. The political spectrum of women's writing from Hearth and Home to the Women's Penny Paper offers insight into women’s changing status in the 1800s. Satirical and comic titles such as Punch and Figaro in London illustrate the humor of the period. This release also charts the growth of children's entertainment and education, with Boy's Own and Good Words for the Young, periodicals that helped shape the values of those future empire builders. Titles like Baily's Monthly Magazine of Sporting, Theatrical, Literary and Fashionable World track the explosion in sports and hobbies, from gardening to horse racing, cricket, cycling and golf.

Contains issues from nearly 400 nineteenth century American newspapers, drawn from a range of urban and rural regions. This primary sources collection encompasses the entire 19th century, with an emphasis on such topics as the American Civil War, African-American culture and history, Western migration and Antebellum-era life among other subjects.

A multi-disciplinary database that covers millions of articles from over 17,000 scholarly journals and other authoritative sources including podcasts, transcripts and videos.

Academic Video Online provides nearly 80,000 titles spanning subjects from anthropology to zoology. Curated for curricular relevance, this streaming video database includes feature films, documentaries, interviews, performances, news programs, newsreels, and demonstrations.

Browse by Channels to see what's available by subject or source, or search by title.

With more than 1,000,000 human-edited definitions, Acronym Finder is the world's largest and most comprehensive dictionary of acronyms, abbreviations, and initialisms. The entries are classified into categories such as Information Technology, Military & Government, Business & Finance, Science & Medicine, Organizations & Schools, Slang & Pop Culture. It also contains a database of US and Canadian postal codes.

Altmetric is a system that tracks the attention that research outputs such as scholarly articles and data sets receive online.  It pulls data from 

• Social media such as Twitter and Facebook
• Traditional media - both mainstream (e.g., The Guradian, New York Times) and field specific (e.g., New Scientist, Bird Watching).  Many non-English language titles are covered.
• Blogs - both major organizations and individual researchers
• Online reference managers such as Mendeley and CiteULike

McMaster users have access to the licensed version of Altmetric Explorer for Institutions, which provides a McMaster-wide view of the online activity surrounding academic research at the institution.

Researchers, research support staff, and administrators can explore attention on scholarly works, browse by author, group or department for their own institution, benchmark against peer organizations, report on the outcomes of outreach activity, and integrate the insights the data provides into evaluation and review processes.

AM Explorer allows you to search across all of McMaster’s primary source databases from Adam Matthew.  These databases cover a wide range of subjects in the humanities and social sciences, and include manuscripts, letters, diaries, pamphlets, newspapers, artistic works, films and videos, advertisements, photographs, maps, and ephemera.  Materials are sourced from archives, museums, and cultural heritage institutions around the world. Since Adam Matthew originated as a British company, many databases reflect British content and perspectives.

Databases included:

Biographical dictionary of more than 19,000 notable American men and women from all eras of American history and culture who are deceased. Includes illustrations and links to other web resources.

Critical reviews of the literature in the social sciences, physical sciences, and biomedical/life sciences.   All articles are written by experts in the field who evaluate the primary research done on a topic and identify major articles in that subject area.  The database allows searches across the 45+ individual "Annual Review of..." journals.

First-ime user? Access requires an Esri ArcGIS account. To request an account, current McMaster students, faculty and staff should fill in this ArcGIS Software Request form or contact  contact libgis@mcmaster.ca. Once your account is approved, sign in to these products with the ArcGIS login (not Your ArcGIS organization's URL).

Provides location-based analysis that can be used for market planning, site selection, customer targeting and other decisions. Use web-based GIS (Geographic Information System) mapping technology to visualize demographic, lifestyle, behavioural, psychographic (e.g., PRIZM, Tapestry Segmentation) spending and business data for over 130 countries (including Canada). Data is derived from a variety of sources (e.g. Esri, Environics, Infogroup, Michael Bauer Research) and will vary for each country. Adding or importing your own data is supported.  Maps, charts, infographics and reports can be created and saved for any area.

The ArticleFirst database contains over 14.3 million bibliographic citations that describe items listed on the table of contents pages of more than 12,000 journals in science, technology, medicine, social science, business, the humanities, and other popular culture. Each record describes one article, news story, letter, or other item. Records contain OCLC library holdings, and many include abstracts.

BASE is a search engine for academic web resources. It povides more than 165 million documents from more than 8,000 sources. About 60% of the indexed documents can be accessed in full text for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library in Germany.

The online Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS) indexes literature on all subjects (especially in the humanities and the social sciences) pertaining to East, Southeast, and South Asia published worldwide from 1971 to the present.  In addition, special projects have contributed substantian numbers of additional citations to the database, among them references to journals on Southeast Asia dating as far back as 1779.

Through 1991, the BAS included citations to Western-language periodical articles, monographs, chapters in edited volumes, conference proceedings, anthologies, and Festschriften.  However, monographs published since 1992 have not been added, and sources such as WorldCat should be consulted instead.

A bibliographic database covering all aspects of Indigenous culture, history, and life in North America. This resource covers a wide range of topics including archaeology, education, the gaming industry, religion, folklore, economic development, acculturation, mythology, missions, tribal governments, and ethnohistory. BIPNA contains more than 350,000 citations for newspapers, magazines, academic journals, books, reviews, and trade publications from the United States and Canada with expanded content from Great Britain and Australia. Dates of coverage for content range from the sixteenth century to the present. The database is an essential research tool for anthropologists, educators, historians, political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, linguists, theologians, and policy makers. BIPNA will appeal to anyone interested in exploring the contributions and lived experiences of North America's Indigenous peoples

A fully cross-searchable gateway to Black Studies including scholarly essays, recent periodicals, historical newspaper articles, reference books, and much more. It combines essential resources for research and teaching in Black Studies, including The Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, Index to Black Periodicals Full Text, Black Literature Index, and the newspaper Chicago Defender.

Borealis, the Canadian Dataverse Repository, is a bilingual, multi-disciplinary, secure, Canadian research data repository, supported by academic libraries and research institutions across Canada. Borealis supports open discovery, management, sharing, and preservation of Canadian research data.

Borealis is available to researchers who are affiliated with a participating Canadian university or research organization and their collaborators. Borealis is a shared service provided in partnership with Canadian regional academic library consortia, institutions, research organizations, and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada, with technical infrastructure hosted by Scholars Portal and the University of Toronto Libraries.

Some value-added features include: 

Supplied by the British Film Institute and Imperial War Museums, this video resource showcases a large collection of newsreels (6,000+) produced by the Topical Film Company. These silent films, which reached a weekly audience of up to five million, offer insights into British life, culture and society with subjects ranging from the First World War, the Royal Family, the Suffragette Movement, and domestic and international politics through to sport, leisure and fashion.

Search or browse issues (full page and article images in PDF) of the Calgary Herald from 1883 to 2010.

The most current issues of the Calgary Herald are available online (plain-text) via Factiva and Nexis Uni

Cambridge is a not-for-profit publisher dedicated to the world-wide dissemination of knowledge across a wide range of subject areas, and currently publishes over 380 peer-reviewed academic journals covering subjects across the humanities, social sciences and science, technology and medicine. As well as those journals owned by the Press itself, they publish on behalf of over 100 learned and professional societies.

Includes the content of nineteen Canadian reference titles in a single online resource.

Includes content from a broad range of Canadian sources including scholarly journals, magazines, reports, news, radio & television transcripts and dissertations. Useful for research on hundreds of topics in the fields of business, science and technology, medicine, humanities and the arts.

Internet Archive Canada (IAC), with its Toronto scanning centre established in 2004 on the campus of the University of Toronto, has worked with more 250 institutions, in providing their unique material(s) with open access and sharing these collections the world over, including texts, collections, images, data, videos and audio. From the Archives of the Sisters of Service to the University of Alberta, IAC has digitized more than 675,000 unique texts. McMaster's collection is also included. 

Indexes publications produced by Canadian governments (federal, provincial, territorial & municipal), government agencies & departments, research institutes and government laboratories. Full-text of reports will be available in the Microlog microfiche collection in MILLS Government Publications (2nd floor).  

Searchable information about facilities, services and academic programs offered by Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada member universities as well as links, expert information, stats and deep content.

Contains 19 million pages (96,000 titles) of digitized historical publications, including monographs, serials, and government publications. The collection is largely composed of materials published prior to 1921. Canadiana Online also includes all content from the closed Early Canadiana Online (ECO) collection, including content from the CIHM microfiche series.

Statistics Canada's site of time series (sequences of values of a variable measured over time, spaced apart at uniform time intervals) covering a wide variety of social and economic aspects of Canadian life. Topics include the system of national accounts, labour, manufacturing, construction, trade, agriculture and finance. As well, selected demographic and social data, such as population estimates and vital statistics, are available. There is no charge for data via this interface. Geographic area: Canada (national and sub-national), some United States, some international. Time span of data coverage: varies by series.