Databases

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:

A bibliographic database of journal articles in fields allied to medicine and alternatives to conventional medicine. An Ovid database.

Covers the history and culture of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Include 450,000+ citations and abstracts from over 2,000 journals; also includes book and media reviews and dissertations.

The AAS collection provides some 7600 distinct North-American-focused historical periodicals, published between 1684 and 1912.  Titles cover a range of subject areas, including, but not limited to: science, technology, medicine, Native American and African American populations, law, politics, government, music, the arts, literature, language, publishing, agriculture, business and industry, advertising and marketing, religion, philosophy, social movements, military matters, and leisure activities.  A small number of Canadian publications, primarily from the mid 19th Century, are also included.

American Film Scripts Online (AFSO) contains 1,009 scripts by 1,062 writers together with detailed, fielded information on the scenes, characters and people related to the scripts. In addition, the database includes facsimilie images for more than 500 of these screenplays. Most of the scripts have never been published before, and are not otherwise available online.

The rationale behind the database is not only to provide access to many previously unpublished screenplays, but to allow scripts to become part of the established corpus of literary works. Legal, authoritative versions of these screenplays will, the producers hope, be consulted by a wide range of scholars, including historians, sociologists, and those who study literature.

From historic pressings to contemporary periodicals, this collection covers nearly 200 years of Indigenous print journalism from the US and Canada. The newspapers represent a wide variety in style, production, audience, and era, and can be used to discover how events were reported by and for Indigenous communities.

This site is an interface to a crystal structure database that includes every structure published in the American Mineralogist, The Canadian Mineralogist, and the European Journal of Mineralogy.

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.

Over 40,000 poems by more than 200 American poets from the Colonial Period to the early twentieth century.

Contains records from dozens of different journals, and covers a wide range of topic areas from materials science to food analysis, and from pharmacology to environmental monitoring. Specific analytes, matrices or techniques can be searched. Informative abstracts provide full analytical method details.

Compiled by the Modern Humanities Research Association, ABELL is a key bibliographical source for English studies.  It indexes monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews, essay collections and dissertations published worldwide on English language and literature.

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.

References to over 500,000 articles and essays on anthropology and archaeology, including art history, demography, economics, linguistics, psychology and religious studies. Indexes articles two or more pages long in over 800 journals and other works (reports, commentaries, edited works and obituaries) published in English and other European languages from the 19th century to the present. Brings together into one resource the highly respected Anthropological Literature from Harvard University and Anthropological Index from the, Royal Anthropological Institute from the U.K.

Contains the past, present and future American Anthropological Association (AAA) publications, including more than 250,000 articles from AAA journals, newsletters, bulletins and monographs in a single place, and cross-disciplinary resources for all things anthropological.

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.

Enfer ("Hell") from the Bibliothèque nationale de France is one of the most storied and sought-after private case collections of forbidden books. The collection was created in the 1830s to protect and isolate works that were considered contrary to the morals of the time. The entire collection was kept in a locked section of the library, accessible only by application to the Director-General of the Bibliothèque and approval by an advisory committee of curators before it was made availabe online. Enfer is made up of more than 2,400 literary works, manuscripts, engravings, lithographs, and photographs. The books in Enfer span from the 1530s to the 2010s, providing a wide perspective throughout time and in different societies on what were considered to be erotic and/or pornographic works. The documents are mainly in French, with some titles also in English, German, Spanish, and a smattering of other languages. Many of the books are beautifully bound and wonderfully illustrated.

A newly added section, International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture, presents material from regions and populations that are not generally encountered in gender and sexuality studies, specifically southern Africa and Australia. The database as a whole brings together approximately 1.5 million pages of primary sources on social, political, health, and legal issues impacting LGBTQ communities around the world. Rare and unique content from newsletters, papers, government documents, manuscripts, pamphlets, and other types of primary sources sheds light on the gay rights movement, activism, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and more. Documents are sourced from over 35 countries, and include extensive material from the Canadian Gay and Lesbian Archives.

The Archives of Sexuality and Gender: Sex and Sexuality, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century is made up of more than five thousand rare and unique books covering sex, sexuality, and gender issues across the sciences and humanities and throughout history. It is the variety of titles and subjects in this archive that make the research opportunities intriguing. Through its many monographs, the collection offers researchers a fascinating collection of historical material providing multiple perspectives on the study of sex, sexuality, and gender. The archive presents content in fourteen different languages, with a predominance in French, English, and German and including Old French, Old English, and Old High German.

Includes over 40 archival collections with a focus on Anti-War Protest Movements, Colonialism, Holocaust Studies, and International Relations, scanned from national and local archives.  Part of Gale Primary Sources.

The ARIBIB is an online database for the astronomical bibliography in the reference format. The bibliographical information is given in following formats: Image format, Index format or Reference format. Abstracts are not included. 

A comprehensive resource for art information featuring indexing and abstracting of over 600 periodicals dating back to 1984, including 280 peer-reviewed journals, as well as indexing and abstracting of over 13,000 art dissertations, and indexing of almost 200,000 art reproductions, which provide examples of styles and art movements, including works by emerging artists. The database covers fine, decorative and commercial art, folk art, photography, film, and architecture, and also includes a database-specific thesaurus.

The ARTFL Project is a full-text database consisting of over 2700 French language texts from the 13th to the 20th centuries including texts in literature, philosophy, arts, and sciences. The database includes texts by French women writers, Provençal poetry, Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, French dictionaries from the 17th - 20th centuries, and Bayle's monumental Dictionnaire historique et critique (5th edition, 1740).

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.

A multidisciplinary index covering the journal literature of the arts and humanities; it fully covers 1,144 of the world's leading arts and humanities journals, and indexes individually selected, relevant items from over 6,800 major science and social science journals. It contains a current total of over 2.5 million records. Subjects covered include archaeology, art, architecture, Asian studies, classics, dance, folklore, history, language, linguistics, literary reviews, literature, music, philosophy, poetry, radio, television, & film, religion and theatre. As of January 2000, the Arts & Humanities Index contains searchable, full-length, English-language author abstracts.

Online access to approximately 400,000 digital images of visual material from different cultures and disciplines which document artistic and historical traditions across many time periods and cultures, and which focus on, but are not limited to, the arts. As a campus-wide resource, ARTstor is designed to be used by researchers in fields that do not traditionally use images, as well as by art historians, and to support a wide range of non-commercial educational and scholarly activities.

The Collection has been derived from several source collections that are the product of collaborations with libraries, museums, photographic archives, publishers, slide libraries, and individual scholars. These source collections include:

arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for 1,835,052 scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv. The archive can be searched by clicking on the index link from the individual subject areas. The archive is owned and operated by Cornell University.

Includes journals, e-books, and standards across all disciplines of civil engineering: Aerospace, Architectural, Coastal and Ocean, Computing in Civil Engineering, Construction, Energy, Engineering Mechanics, Environmental, Geotechnical, Hydraulic, Infrastructure, Materials, Management, Professional Issues, Structural, Transportation, Urban Planning, Water Resources.

This edition of Asian American Drama contains 252 plays by 42 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. Some 50% of these plays have never been published before. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.

This freely available database provides information on over 200,000 artists, with a focus on American artists from the early 16th-Century through the present. Some services are restricted to subscribers: McMaster currently does not have a subscription.

This fully searchable online database now contains 40,300 binary and ternary alloy phase diagrams, from over 9,000 systems. With associated crystal and reaction data, the ASM Alloy Phase Diagram Database places this reliable information at your fingertips.

The latest update includes more than 230 new aluminum, 87 new copper, 86 new magnesium, and 71 new titanium ternary phase diagrams; 895 new ternary diagrams, including 185 ternary systems that are new to the database; 205 new binary diagrams, including 12 binary systems that are new to the database.