ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

Internet Reviews

Sara Amato, editor

Sara Amato is electronic services and Web development librarian at Bowdoin College, e-mail: samato@bowdoin.edu

CAIN Web Service.(Conflict Archive on the Internet). Access: http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/. This academic Web site provides a wealth of information on the conflict in Northern Ireland from 1968 to the present. It contains fulltext book chapters, essays, and research articles contributed by historians, political scientists, and other researchers on “The Troubles.” Also included are bibliographies, chronologies, documents, statistics, photographs, maps, and other images.

The CAIN Project “aims to develop, using Northern Ireland as a case study, a collaborative multimedia database of resources relevant to teaching and research in conflict studies.” The project is a partnership between the University of Ulster, the Queen’s University of Belfast, and the Linen Hall Library in Belfast, which contain a unique archive of source materials on the Northern Ireland conflict. The CAIN Project Manager is Martin Melaugh, who is affiliated with INCORE (Initiative on Conflict Resolution and Ethnicity), located at the University of Ulster. Content for the site is reviewed by a panel of academics, including historians, political scientists, sociologists, and others.

The site is organized in three main categories: Conflict Background, Key Events (civil rights, hunger strikes, peace process, and other events), and Key Issues (discrimination, education, women, and more). For each event or issue there is background information, a reading list, a chronology, and full-text sources. Many parts of this site are still under construction, but there are already many useful sources available, including full-text documents such as the April 1998 peace agreement, political party documents, briefing papers, and articles on the Irish peace process. Material is regularly added to the site. The Recent Additions page shows an impressive list of book chapters, articles, and other publications new to the CAIN archive.

Other useful features are a glossary, a list of organizations, extensive statistical data on society and culture in Northern Ireland, and the CAIN Bibliography—a searchable database of over 3,500 books, journal articles, dissertations, pamphlets, and other materials. There are numerous links to research-oriented Web sites on Irish studies and peace studies, plus links to nongovernmental organizations, political parties, government sites, news sites, and discussion lists on Irish history and politics. Also helpful to librarians and researchers are several guides to doing research on Northern Ireland. There is an impressive array of information here for instructors, researchers, and students.—Susan E Clark, University of the Pacific, e-mail: sclark® uop.edu

Political Database of the Americas.

Access:http://www.georgetown.edu/pdba/. The Political Database of the Americas (PDBA), a collaborative effort of Georgetown University’s Center for Latin American Studies and the Organization of American States, defines its mission as “filling a void in the electronic informational resources available to students, academics, policy analysts, and government officials in Latin American politics.”

The underlying hope is that by providing free access to primary sources of political information on countries in North and South America, the PDBA will contribute towards democratization in the region.

The multilingual site (English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French) is arranged into eight subject areas: Constitutions and Constitutional Studies; Electoral Systems and Election Data; Civil Society, Public Opinion, and Democratic Values; Political Parties; Executive Institutions; Legislative Institutions; Judicial Institutions; and Organic Legislation. Each main subject area is further divided by type of information available: Reference Materials, Primary Documents, and Statistical Data, dependent upon the subject. Types of data considered to be Reference Materials encompass: bibliographies; lists of contacts and Web sites for many governmental and non-governmental agencies and political parties; chronologies of presidents; and governmental and judicial organizational charts. Information available under Primary Documents include: constitutions; election laws; political party laws; and organic legislation, such as the Honduran Declaration on Human Rights.

Statistical data that may be accessed through PDBA are breakdowns of party representations in national legislatures and election results.

Much of the content made available through PDBA is in the form of links to Web sites in different countries, which provide political data as well as access to regional newspapers.

However, the site does offer the unique “Comparative Analysis of the Constitutions of Countries with Presidential Regimes.” Specially developed for the PDBA, this section compares national constitutions section by section (for example, Brazil’s constitutional preamble vs. Argentina’s constitutional preamble) or by subject areas such as human rights, executive powers, or environmental protection. Most of the primary source data on PDBA is only available in the language of the country of origin, including the constitutional comparisons. The entire site can be searched by keyword or by country.

The Political Database of the Americas should prove to be a very useful resource for students of Latin American history and politics, or anyone interested in constitutional issues and elections. I hope that the developers of this Web site continue to link additional resources as they become available.—Geraldine Foudy, SUNY Stony Brook, e-mail: geraldine. foudy@sunysb.edu

Social Sciences Data on the Net. Access: http://odwin.ucsd.edu/idata/.

The University of California, San Diego (UCSD) maintains “Social Sciences Data on the Net” as one component of its Social Sciences Data Collection.

Although data collections are accessible elsewhere on the Internet, only UCSD provides the two specialized search utilities that are available on this page. The first of these, the “original, classic version of Data on the Net,” searches a collection of pages chosen and annotated by librarians. The second, the “new robotic-experimental Data on the Net,” uses a robot to collect information about social science data sites.

Librarians then use this information to choose specific sites for indexing by a spider. The spider assigns information to fields and also assigns weights to search results based on word frequency. The current status of the project is described on the site.

A sample search on “adoption” using the classic version yielded only one result. The same search on the experimental search utility produced 6l hits, which are arranged by presumed relevance and which can be further sorted using convenient drop-down menus. The results of these sample searches suggest that the experimental search utility is superior to the classic version, but users are advised that the file is still incomplete. For best results, users should, therefore, use both search utilities if only for the annotations available in the classic version.

It should also be pointed out that not all the data identified by the two search utilities are publicly available.

The second feature of “Social Sciences Data on the Net” is a set of hyperlinks to categories of data on the Internet. Although careful examination is sometimes required to discern the distinctions between these categories, the seasoned researcher who is willing to plow through long lists of links may find valuable resources. Less experienced researchers who are browsing for data sources would be better served by resources such as the University of Michigan’s “Statistical Resources on the Web” at http://www.lib.umich.edu/libhome/ Documents. center/stats. html.

“Social Sciences Data on the Net” will be a boon to serious social sciences researchers for its specialized access to data sources. Others who are less interested in data will profit from the many search results that describe, announce, or summarize data.—Tom Nichol, College of St. Benedict & St.John’s University, e-mαil: tnichol@ csbsju.edu ■