Internet Reviews

Joni R. Roberts and Carol Drost

EconBiz. Access: https://www.econbiz.de/.

EconBiz is a search portal for journal articles, working papers, and conferences in business studies and economics. It’s a service of Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (ZBW). Based in Germany, ZBW is “the world’s largest special library for economics.” The content comes from the following sources: ECONIS (ZBW’s catalogue), RePEc (the Research Papers in Economics open access database), EconStor (ZBW’s open access server), BASE (the economics and business section of the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine), and OLC-SSG (bibliographic data from the economy, business economics, and economic sectors subject collections of the Swets Database Online Contents). There are nearly 12 million publications, and two million of those are open access full text. With content written in multiple languages, selecting English for the language filter is an important step. Some filters, such as subject and type of publication, contain non-English options.

Underneath the search bar on the homepage, there are four buttons providing information geared toward different audiences: “For students,” “For researchers,” “For teaching,” and “For institutes.” The section for institutions includes information on contributing open-access publications to make them discoverable in EconBiz, something that may be of interest to faculty researchers. Undergraduate students may find evaluating sources in EconBiz more difficult compared to other databases because it contains grey literature and does not have a peer review filter. However, assistance is available through EconDesk, which is staffed by ZBW business and economics subject librarians. Questions asked via the chat icon at the bottom of all pages will be answered within two days.

A strength of this resource is the help provided. An interactive tour provides a series of pop-ups that highlight the steps on the screen for searching, filtering results, and accessing full text. It also includes quick tips and examples for finding fewer or more results using quotes, wildcards, and Boolean operators. Another helpful tool linked from the EconBiz homepage is the STW Thesaurus for Economics. It includes more than 6,000 standardized subject headings to support searching.

Ongoing development is evident. A “Beta” page highlights new features, including author profiles using linked data and a visual event search with items from the events calendar plotted on an interactive map. For researchers in economics, EconBiz is particularly useful for grey literature that may be difficult to discover elsewhere. —Lucy Rosenbloom, Xavier University of Louisiana, lrosenbl@xula.edu

Latino Cultures in the US. Access: https://artsandculture.google.com/project/uslatinocultures.

Latino Cultures in the US is an online hub of digital collections available through Google Arts and Culture. All items in Latino Cultures in the US relate to Latino art, culture, and history and come from well-known museums such as the Museum of Latin American Art as well as niche museums such as the Selena Museum, the Nuyorican Poets Café, and the International Salsa Museum. Latino Cultures in the US is divided into the subheadings “Art & Entertainment,” “Icons & Heroes,” “History & Traditions,” and “Communities Today,” with links to more than 5,000 images, 265 videos, and 150 stories. Some of the more unique topics are early Mexican cookbooks, mestizáje identity, disabled Latinos, and the style of Latinas in Los Angeles. The website also includes downloadable lesson plans on art, culture, and politics.

Latino Cultures in the US is strongest in the arts and contains audio and video content. “The Sights and Sounds of Frida’s Self-Portrait” provides a detailed analysis of the symbols in Frida Kahlo’s Self Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States, and later “Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry” delivers the same comprehensive breakdown of his murals in the Detroit Institute of Arts.

The metadata for each item is determined by its collection or museum, so there are inconsistencies between collections. The University of Texas San Antonio’s cookbook collection includes the date, author, and link to the fully digitized document, while other collections do not have that amount of detail, and so citing the sources may be tricky. The volume of material is both a blessing and a curse, and Latino Cultures in the US cannot be searched on its own; any searches are conducted in all of Google Arts and Culture. This much material requires clear navigation, and the arrangement is not well defined; art has its own section, but it also periodically appears between sections that are not related. The interface does not allow for opening material in a new tab, so the user must back out of all links.

While the website can be cumbersome, it compiles a wealth of information about Latinos in the United States. It is an excellent source for a teacher looking to augment Hispanic Heritage Month discussions with more than Dia de los Muertos and well-known artists. The site emphasizes that being Latino is not one identity and encompasses many intersectionalities and cultures. —Delores Carlito, University of Alabama at Birmingham, dcarlito@uab.edu