Internet Reviews

Dawn Behrend

The Association of Religion Data Archives. Access: https://www.thearda.com/.

The Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) “strives to democratize access to the best data on religion.” Founded in 1997 as the American Religion Data Archive, ARDA is now a worldwide resource led by researchers from the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland, with funding from the Lilly Endowment and other sources. ARDA draws on the US Census and surveys by academic and corporate institutions and offers researchers tools including MARC and syntax files, a dictionary of religious terms, papers, teaching resources, a question bank, and maps.

The showcase resource is the Community Profile Builder, which allows users to select a region in the United States and see a list of congregations, major religious traditions, and other local factors such as housing and some demographic information. The Data Archive and other sections of the site offer additional data, including the Measurements database, which contains a selection of single-item measures on topics such as abortion, the environment, and belief in God. The Community Profile Builder appears to be limited to US data, and the international coverage is uneven, with some countries well represented and others scarcely included.

Reflecting the broader Western discourse on religion, ARDA’s content is predominantly Christocentric, with an emphasis on Protestantism. The Religious Traditions page features eight varieties of Christianity (including three Protestant traditions) alongside single links for Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and an “Other” category. On the Measurements page, many items appear to be framed for a Christian audience. For instance, respondents are asked about their “views of” Buddhists, Jews, and Catholics, but not Protestants, and questions about God include options for belief in a higher power but not for polytheistic perspectives. Exploring further may uncover more useful data on non-Christian practice and belief among the archived materials, but the focus is Christianity. Notably, a Community Profile search of an area well known for its substantial Jewish population, which Google Maps indicates contains more than a dozen synagogues, yielded no results for Jewish congregations.

Despite these caveats, ARDA constitutes a valuable resource, especially for researchers and instructors examining contemporary religious trends within the US Christian context. Academic librarians will find ARDA particularly useful for collection development, research support, and information literacy instruction in religion and the social sciences, given its extensive datasets and instructional resources. — Maggie Froelich, Claremont School of Theology, mfroelich@cst.edu

The Asia Society. Access: https://asiasociety.org.

The Asia Society website clearly presents its global mission: “Navigating shared futures for Asia and the world across policy, arts and culture, education, sustainability, business, and technology.” The site creates a refined, modern tone with a full-width hero slider featuring events and multimedia. The navigation is clearly structured under Programs, Arts & Culture, Education, and Policy, offering intuitive access for academic users—librarians, faculty, and students—to browse by topic and explore content across disciplines. However, while the visual design is appealing, the large amount of content—events, news, and exhibitions—can make it challenging for users to locate discrete scholarly materials rather than event-driven updates.

From a content standpoint, the site covers three general pillars: Arts & Culture, Education, and Policy. The website offers policy briefs, cultural commentary, exhibition listings, and instructional activities, all of which are useful for academic librarians who are curating resources for faculty and students. These are items of genuine scholarly interest, but they are dispersed throughout various program sections rather than being housed in a discrete, searchable archive. Although there is a search icon on the site, it is a basic keyword search with no academic-level filtering by author, publication type, or date. There is no single repository with rich metadata tagging or subject indexing. Thus, librarians, faculty, researchers, and students must search within individual program pages or general searches to access comprehensive reports and expert analysis, less specific discovery than in traditional academic databases.

In terms of usability, the site employs a responsive design that adapts effectively to different screen sizes, which is useful for both desktop and mobile users. There is readable typography, and sufficient contrast color aids legibility. The site appears reasonably accessible, but more structured headings and clearer image descriptions would likely make the site usable by all users, including assistive technology users.

For academics, the Asia Society site offers valuable curated commentary, global perspectives, and timely observations regarding Asian policy, culture, and education. Adding more detailed citation information and more stable references for significant materials would help scholars incorporate the site’s content more effectively into teaching and research. Academic librarians will find the Asia Society website to be a rich resource for curating interdisciplinary materials, guiding faculty and students to relevant policy briefs, cultural analyses, and educational content across Asia-related topics. — Jia Mi, The College of New Jersey, jmi@tcnj.edu

Society for Classical Studies. Access: https://www.classicalstudies.org/.

The website for the Society of Classical Studies (SCS) has a wealth of information for a variety of audiences, from those with a passing interest in ancient Greek, Roman, and Mediterranean studies to the faculty researcher. Originally founded in 1869 as the American Philological Association, the group was renamed the Society of Classical Studies in 2014. As the primary North American association for Classical Studies, members include universities and college and classical scholars but is open to all with an interest.

The site is regularly updated and provides access to both informal and formal scholarship through their publications. The SCS Blog offers shorter insights into a variety of topics and projects in Classical Studies, although the number of posts to the blog has greatly reduced in recent years. The site also provides access to Transactions of the American Philological Association (TAPA), a peer-reviewed journal dating to the society’s founding. The current issue of TAPA is open access, and the site provides contents and abstracts from 1996 onward. Subscribing institutions and society members can access full text for issues from 2000 to present via Project Muse, and back issues (1869–2016) can be accessed by JSTOR subscribers.

General information about the Society is provided, such as goals, governance, and volunteer opportunities. The Society has five divisions including Resources, Communications and Outreach, Education, Professional Matters, and Program. Members of SCS can access membership and annual meeting information and member-only information on the website. Interested individuals can also access career postings, resources, professional data, awards information, and past annual meeting information. SCS data topics include faculty and curricula, journal data, placement and hiring, among other subjects.

The SCS site is a robust site, offering both information about the Society and a variety of resources for those interested in Classical Studies. With its impressive history and resources, the SCS website is an essential research and professional tool for all levels of academia, especially Classical Studies, while also offering accessible information to the generalist. The SCS website serves as a key resource for academic librarians, providing access to peer-reviewed journals, historical archives, career and curriculum data, and other materials that support research, instruction, and collection development in Classical Studies. — Krista Godfrey, University of Victoria, kgodfrey@uvic.ca