Internet Reviews

Joni R. Roberts and Carol Drost

Joni R. Roberts is associate university librarian for public services and collection development at Willamette University, email: jroberts@willamette.edu, and Carol A. Drost is associate university librarian for technical services at Willamette University, email: cdrost@willamette.edu.

Animal Welfare Institute. Access: https://awionline.org/.

The Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) is a nonprofit organization addressing animal suffering caused by humans. The AWI works with policymakers, scientists, industry, and the public to improve conditions for animals in the laboratory, farm, in commerce, at home, and in the wild.

The AWI’s website provides information to encourage action on their initiatives. The website is searchable from the homepage, and search results include content from all sections of the website. The website is clearly organized for browsing by sections including “Animal Programs,” “Government Affairs,” “Legal,” and “Library & Store.”

“Animal Programs” is an extensive section of the website, providing articles on issues faced by animals in laboratories, companion animals, farmed animals, marine life, terrestrial animals, and animals used in education. Each section comprises articles addressing the issues experienced by animals in these environments and the AWI’s work in each area. For example, in the marine life section, an article on whaling addresses where and why whaling takes place, the suffering a struck whale experiences before death, and work the AWI is doing to protect whales. Linked articles provide more information from the AWI about issues of commercial whaling, whaling in specific locations, Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling, and more. Most of the articles in this section do not reference sources outside of the AWI.

The “Government Affairs” section of the website outlines federal and state legislation related to AWI’s aims, other laws and measures, tips for communicating with legislators, an action center, and a link to register to vote. Articles on legislation present clearly AWI’s stance on the issue and occasionally reference sources from outside of the AWI. The “Legal” section lists current and past lawsuits initiated by the AWI.

“Library and Store” contains the AWI’s publications. Free downloadable publications are illustrated with beautiful photographs and include brochures, books, the newsletter AWI Quarterly, and more. Books on animal rights topics for children, teens, and adults are available for purchase.

The AWI’s website will be most useful to your campus’s animal rights groups, who can use the website to learn key talking points and download brochures for distribution. Consider also using the website to open discussions with students in political science, communications, education, biology, environmental sciences, agriculture, and health sciences, about how advocacy organizations present information to encourage action.—Emily Hamstra, Network of the National Library of Medicine, Region 5, ehamstra@uw.edu

Center for Women’s History. Access: https://www.nyhistory.org/womens-history.

COVID-19 accelerated the move toward remote work and social spaces. This legacy is seen in museums and archival collections around the world that responded to the closure of their physical spaces by creating robust, interactive virtual spaces that live on. The New York Historical Society’s Center for Women’s History offers a rich online collection highlighting archival finds, fellowships, courses, and more virtual content that scholars and educators from elementary to graduate level will find useful.

Browsing the site in August 2023, the center’s front page featured a curriculum titled “Women and the American Story.” Beginning at the dawn of the Colonial Era, the curriculum is divided into ten units organized chronologically through 2001. The key takeaways from each unit are highlighted at the top, and users are provided with questions to help frame their learning. This curriculum would work as stand-alone lessons or could be integrated into a general lesson plan on American History. The lessons are supported by primary documents, biographies, period literature and art, as well as tools and artifacts of communities and families. Users will also find a four-course program in collaboration with Columbia University titled “Women have Always Worked,” but should note after a seven-day trial period the course requires a monthly fee.

The archives section links primarily to finding aids; however, researchers would still have to visit the collection in person to access materials not included in online exhibits or courses. This may be an opportunity to grow the website in the future when more digital surrogates of the physical materials become available. Even without digitization of the actual materials, researchers will find the chronological arrangement and rich descriptions in finding aids useful in preparation for an in-person research visit.

Current physical exhibitions are featured on the site, but users should also consider clicking on the explore tab, which opens to the museum in aggregate, revealing several robust online exhibits, some of which are related to women’s history, including “Women March,” a history of women-led protests from 1820 to 2020. There is much to explore on this page for scholars, educators, and even those with a casual interest in the history of women in the United States.—Bart H. Everts, Camden County College and Rowan University in Camden, bart.everts@rutgers.edu

Peterson Institute for International Economics. Access: https://www.piie.com/.

The Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) is an esteemed independent nonprofit think tank based in Washington, DC. Since its founding in 1981, PIEE has focused on a broad variety of international policy concerns around the world, with emphasis on major economic powers. This freely accessible website currently indexes just over 10,000 documents, of which 45% are in the form of blog entries, 22% are commentaries, 9% are multimedia, and 8% are event announcements that include background information about guest speakers. The remaining 16% of all documents include a mixture of working papers, policy briefs, op-eds, and public testimony before governmental bodies.

“PIIE Charts” is a collection of graphics accompanied by a textual summary and either a citation or a link to the underlying in-depth document. PIIE’s strength resides in their efforts to explore, analyze, dissect, and discuss policies and potential concerns. Although many of their documents obviously contain statistics, PIIE does not index data sources as discrete search results. PIIE offers transparency and access to their 50 senior researchers and 6 staff analysts, whose works have been authored in 17 languages.

Inside the major section called “Research” is a button that will yield 56 “Educational Resources” since 2016. As for recent hot topics, the site yields seven items mentioning the March 2023 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. The website’s search engine conducts full-text searches, so users looking for “FDIC” will find articles about the US banking system, as well as PIIE staff who previously worked for that regulatory agency. Whether the researcher uses the website’s keyword search box (which accepts quotation marks) or options for major types of inquiry, the results are displayed in date-descending sequence and offer the ability to modify results by a specific date range, major topic, or major geographic area.

Less than 2% of all documents found on this website have publications dates prior to 2000 and the oldest document was from 1989. PIIE’s website includes summaries of books that PIIE sells directly to the public, as well as some titles that were published through an arrangement with Columbia University Press. PIIE invites people to sign up for their general email announcements, as well as a separate subscription list for updates on their educational resources. Students interested in public policy, politics, and economics will find PIEE a helpful resource.—Gary M. Klein, Willamette University, gklein@willamette.edu