Databases

Provides researchers rich archival content, visual ephemera, monographs, and videos that explore how food shapes the world around us.

Online full-page newspaper archive of The Globe & Mail from May 1844, current 4 years embargoed. Coverage includes all the stories, plus thousands of images, advertisements, classifieds, political cartoons, births and deaths from Canada's national newspaper, dating back to the pre-confederation era.

The most current issues of The Globe & Mail are available in print and online (plain-text) via Factiva and other 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.

Provides access to information on measurement instruments (i.e., questionnaires, interview schedules, checklists, index measures, coding schemes/ manuals, rating scales, projective techniques, vignettes/scenarios, tests) in the health fields, psychosocial sciences, organizational behavior, and library and information science. Designed to identify measures needed for research studies, grant proposals, client/patient assessment, class papers/projects, theses/dissertations, and program evaluation.

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.

Covers social science and interdisciplinary research; includes nearly two million bibliographic references to journal articles, books, reviews and selected chapters dating back to 1951. It is unique in its broad coverage of international material and incorporates over 100 languages and countries. Over 2,700 journals are regularly indexed and some 7,000 books included each year. Abstracts are provided for half of all current journal articles and full text availability is continually increasing.

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.

The Mass Observation project collected information about everyday life in Britain during the mid-twentieth century, reflecting attitudes, behaviors, and public opinion. Created by three British researchers as a personal research project, its focus changed as it served the government during the Second World War and then emerged as a market research organization. The findings continue to be valued for their insight into British society, although sometimes criticized for the self-selecting methodology used to collect the data.

The online database provides over 2,000 File Reports (top-level summaries), Day Surveys from 1937-38, Diaries from 1939-67, and a range of Topic collections including: Household Matters and Household Budgeting, 1939-1950; Juvenile Delinquency; Korea, 1950; Radio Listening, 1939-1948; World Outlook, 1945-1950, Film; Reading Habits; Dreams; Religion; Victory Celebrations, and Capital Punishment.

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).

The NCJRS Abstracts Database contains summaries of the more than 200,000 criminal justice, juvenile justice, and substance abuse resources housed in the NCJRS Library collection.   Sources include U.S. and international publications, federal, state, and local government reports, books, research reports, journal articles, audiovisual presentations, and unpublished research. The NCJRS Abstracts Database excludes most legal decisions, opinions, and statutes.

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.

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.

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.

Odesi is a Canadian social science data repository and online exploration and analysis tool. It contains 5,700+ datasets curated by academic libraries in Canada.

The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) online library of books, reports, working papers, periodicals and statistical data covering a wide range of subjects including agriculture & food, development, economics, education, employment, energy, environment, finance & investment, governance, industry & services,  social issues, migration & health, taxation and transport.  Search by keyword(s) or browse by theme or by country name.

OECD (including NEA and IEA) publishes fourteen journals and newsletters, and ten statistical periodicals. Each is available in printed form and online.

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.

Combining features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia, the Bibliographies identify the best available scholarship across a wide variety of subjects.  McMaster subscribes to the following subjects:  African American Studies (New), Anthropology, Atlantic History (New), Biblical Studies, Geography, International Relations, Jewish Studies, Literary & Cultural Theory, Philosophy, Political Science, Social Work, and Sociology.

Provides scholarly review articles summarizing current thinking and research in a range of subjects across the humanaities, social sciences, and sciences.  Each handbook offers in-depth introductions to topics and a critical survey of the current state of scholarship.  McMaster's access has expanded to include all 1200 Handbooks.

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.

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

Contains thousands of full-text e-books across a variety of disciplines. To display titles accessible to McMaster users, use the "Book Status" filter and select "Owned and subscribed to by my library." 

Individual titles are also listed in McMaster's library catalogue and in the standard ProQuest databases platform.

The PTSDpubs bibliographic database, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, includes citations and abstracts to the worldwide literature on post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychological effects of trauma.