eReviews: Religion Resources and Short Takes
Apr 15, 2011Most major database providers—ProQuest, EBSCO, and Gale—offer a professional-level resource covering religion or a religion/philosophy combination. There are also several specialized bibliographic and reference products dedicated to the study of individual faiths including Islam, Judaism, and Catholicism, as well as titles that focus on religious topics like Bible studies or the Koran. All of them give researchers a scholarly and dispassionate means of exploring issues that in our increasingly combative culture are often otherwise too hot to touch.
With the exception of the ATLA (American Theological Library Association) Religion Database with ATLASerials, which is generally regarded as the premier resource for all fields of religious studies, we chose to relegate most of the fine bibliographic and full-text products to the shorter reviews. This allowed us to focus on products that all offered a little something different in terms of both content and delivery. The statistical World Religion Database (Brill) is geared to religious demographers. Testaments to the Holocaust (Gale) provides the earliest Holocaust research as well as primary-source material from both Nazi propagandists and Holocaust survivors. Finally, the Religion module of Oxford Scholarship Online (Oxford Univ.) presents authoritative scholarship in ebook form.
ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials
American Theological Library Association (ATLA)
www.atla.com/products/catalog/Pages/rdb-db.aspx
CONTENT The preeminence of this index to journal articles, book reviews, and essay collections in all fields of religion is well established; ATLA Religion Database (ATLA RDB) with ATLASerials (ATLAS)—produced by the American Theological Library Association (ATLA)—combines the all-inclusive Religion Database index with ATLA’s online collection of major religion and theology journals. Subject coverage is vast, including the Bible, archaeology and antiquities, church history, missions, ecumenism, pastoral ministry, world religions and religious studies, theology, philosophy, and ethics.
The numbers are astounding: with more than 1.8 million bibliographic records covering the research literature of religion and theology in over 60 languages, the database encompasses nearly 600,000 journal article citations from more than 1700 journals (549 currently indexed), some 249,000 essay citations from nearly 18,000 multi-author works, 547,000-plus book review citations, and a growing number of multimedia citations. In addition, full text is provided for more than 294,000 articles and book reviews from more than 170 journals selected by leading U.S. religion scholars.Print equivalents include
Religion Index One: Periodicals; Religion Index Two: Multi-Author Works; and Index to Book Reviews in Religion, something to keep in mind for institutions looking to free up shelf space. Most coverage in the database begins in 1908, although retrospective indexing for several select titles (e.g., Methodist Reviews, Christian Oracle, Andover Review, etc.) extends back to the 19th century.
Also available are the ATLA Archive Databases made up of the ATLA Historical Monographs Collection, currently with two series that offer access to more than 29,000 primary-source titles on theology and religion: Series One contains titles from the 13th–19th centuries; Series Two covers titles published from 1894 to 1923. Soon, the ATLA Historical Serials Collection will be made up of more than 1200 titles, providing scholars with access to publications from the 18th through the early 20th centuries, including church agency annuals and reports, religious newspapers and magazines, and scholarly journals.
USABILITY ATLA makes ATLA RDB with ATLAS available through Ovid and EBSCO, with the latter interface used for this review. It’s a powerful resource capable of handling sophisticated queries; the standard functionalities of the EBSCOhost platform are widely known. However, a few features unique to this database are worth noting, including the Scripture citation indexing that gives users access to the ATLA Hierarchical Scripture Authority to identity articles that reference individual chapters or verses.
In addition to the usual Basic, Advanced, and Visual search modes, EBSCO serves up several Browse options for ATLA RDB, including Publication, Scriptures, and Index. Selecting Scriptures at the top of the screen allows users to choose a specific chapter or verse, and the results will display all citations about the chapter or verse along with articles about any range of verses spanning it.
The ATLA Hierarchical Scripture Authority displays an ordered version of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. Using as a reference a recent Torah portion (Vayikra, Leviticus 1:1–5:26), we began our query of specific Scripture passages by first selecting the Expand link next to Leviticus. Selecting Chapter 5, then verse five retrieved six records, including “Contemporary reflection,” a citation to an essay from the 2008 publication The Torah: A Women’s Commentary. To broaden this search a bit, we selected the Subjects link of Leviticus 1–16 in the detailed record, which expanded our results to 173, 34 scholarly and full text.
For precision-passage searching, users can select the Scripture Citation Index from the list of Indexes to browse. While entering the beginning of a Scripture citation, with the name of the book and the chapter, users can also enter the first verse of the passage if known. For example, we entered Matthew 1–4 and retrieved a list of 79 citations. Multiple passages can be added with Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) if searchers are looking for more than one specific passage or wanting to include a range but exclude one particular verse.
Users familiar with the EBSCOhost platform can employ all the standard features to maximize their search experience: limiting by source type, date, subject, or publication or enabling cross-searching with other subscribed databases.
PRICING EBSCO bases pricing on a number of factors, including FTE or population served and consortia agreements. Discount pricing based on an academic FTE of roughly 2400 is $8100, which includes the serials component. Thirty-day trials are available.
END USERS ATLA Religion Database, with the added benefit ATLASerials, remains the essential resource, bar none. Fundamental for college and university core collections supporting serious scholarship in religious and theological studies through programs in history, theology, religion, philosophy, sociology, and other disciplines.
ATLA also has ATLAS for Alum, a grant-funding opportunity provided by Lilly Endowment Inc. to offer ATLASerials to registered alumni of ATLA institutional members with an institutional subscription for the ATLA Religion Database and for ATLASerials.
World Religion Database
Brill; brill.nl/wrdo
CONTENT As the methodology statement for Brill’s World Religion Database (WRD) notes, there are thousands of statistical sources for religious demography available to those working in the field. Prior to the publication of WRD, however, little effort had been made by the scholarly community to impose any sort of order on these various data sets, a deficiency that has essentially had the effect of reducing much scholarly writing to the level of sheer guesswork. WRD, then, aims to “render a definitive picture of international religious demography” by collecting, collating, and analyzing the statistical data on religious affiliation for every country in the world from a variety of disparate sources and delivering it to the scholars looking for consistent, reliable qualitative evidence to support their positions. WRD is copublished by the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs at Boston University and edited by Todd M. Johnson and Brian J. Grim.
Besides the wealth of current data down to the province level, WRD also includes historical statistics (or best estimates) back to 1900 as well as projections out to 2050 and access to the sources—censuses and surveys—from which the figures are derived. Contents are updated quarterly, with the January 2011 update incorporating the analyzed results from census data for over 100 countries, 44 demographic and health surveys, and 82 Pew Global Attitudes Project surveys.
USABILITY The main WRD page features a simple search box, a description of the contents with notes about recent updates, and links to five specialized directories within the resource: the Main Query Home Page, Censuses & Surveys Home Page, Religion Home Page, Religious Freedom Home Page, and the Top 20 Lists page.
While the contents may be searched by keyword in a basic way, most WRD use will come via browsing these directories. We selected Fastest Growing Religions as our criteria from the Top 20 Lists directory, then sorted our selection by Country Name, the Rate of change from 2000 to 2010 (in descending order from the fastest growing to the greatest decline), and finally by Religion. The resulting table suggests that in Afghanistan a miniscule decline (from 99.77 percent to 99.73 percent) in the percentage of the population that identifies itself as Muslims may have produced dramatic increases in the percentage (although not the number) of people identifying as atheists or agnostics over the course of the decade.
A query in The Religious Freedom Index (calculated as the country average of government restrictions and social restrictions), where we set the search criteria for a fairly low degree of Religious Freedom and high levels of Religious Conflict and Religious Violence, produced a group made up of Iraq, Pakistan, Palestine, Israel, Yemen, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Russia when sorted from most to least violent.
There is considerable flexibility in terms of output, which is obviously a key feature in a resource like this. Data may be sorted on up to three fields and printed in tabular format as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file or (less commonly) as a formatted file. Database queries may be exported to a comma-delimited text file (which in turn may be imported into Excel) or as a tab-delimited text file.
A Feedback link encourages users to leave comments on sources, methodology, and field-specific data. Users interested in discussing the issues they raise may leave contact information via this mechanism.
PRICING The subscription price for WRD is $870, and customers may opt to purchase it outright for $5180. There is an installment fee of $460. Brill also offers special pricing to customers who couple WRD with World Christian Database, also published by Brill. Free trials are available.
END USERS WRD does an exemplary job of addressing the needs of serious scholars and upper-level students in the fields of religious demography and religious studies more generally. While WRD could be used for ready-reference work—it’s possible to determine, for example, that only in Israel (at 72.52 percent) and Palestine (at 11.82 percent) do Jews make up more than two percent of the population—we would anticipate that this is a resource that will appeal primarily to a highly sophisticated but relatively small group of researchers. For that matter, we can even anticipate that a percentage of writers might steer clear of WRD simply because reliable qualitative data would potentially undermine the fantasy-based elements of their work.
World Christian Database (WCD) complements WRD by providing demographic information on all aspects of Christianity and specific Christian denominations. Subscribers to WRD and WCD may arrange simultaneous access to both databases.
Testaments to the Holocaust
Gale Cengage Learning;
gdc.gale.com/products/testaments-to-the-holocaust/
CONTENT Testaments to the Holocaust (TTTH) traces its history back to the efforts of Alfred Wiener, a German Jew who fled his home in 1933. He helped establish the Jewish Central Information Office in Amsterdam, whose purpose was gathering and disseminating intelligence about the alarming events inside Nazi Germany. The collection relocated to London in 1939 and became a valuable source of data throughout the war.
After the war ended, the Wiener Library supplied documents to the United Nations War Crimes Commission and was a center for Holocaust scholarship. Its work continued into the 1960s as teams of interviewers gathered some 1200 eyewitness accounts from survivors at a time when many people preferred to forget what had happened.
In his Introduction, Ben Barkow, general editor and director of the Wiener Library, details the singular contents found here. Among the examples of propaganda are the ideologically oriented textbooks (some with marginalia revealing how successful the Nazis’ attempts to contaminate the minds of Germany’s youth had been), Hitler Youth materials, a rare anti-Semitic encyclopedia, songbooks glorifying the Reich and its leader, and a collection of calendars produced by various Nazi organizations. There’s even a coloring book.
The photographic collection encompasses 4000 images of Jewish life prior to the Nazi takeover, progresses through periods of increasing civil unrest, and culminates in the rise of Hitler and the National Socialist Party. Some of the more extreme images depict scenes of the death squads, ghetto life, and the concentration camps.
Finally, TTTH includes original materials issued by the library itself during its stay in Amsterdam, two periodicals published in London during the war, and the Wiener Library Bulletin published from 1946 to 1981, a groundbreaking journal that nurtured the earliest scholarly debate (much of it in English) on Holocaust-related themes.
In addition to Barkow’s Introduction, readers will find two other scholarly essays on the origins of the Holocaust and the imprisonment of Jews in the Reich’s extensive network of ghettos, prisons, and concentration camps.
USABILITY The austere Testaments Home Page briefly describes the contents and offers users the option of employing the English- or German-language version of the interface. There’s a warning—“Some readers may find images within this collection disturbing”—and a link to begin searching.
The search page gives users access to Basic Search mode, along with links to the Browse Indexes menu, a short list of other Holocaust-related sites, the Introduction and other essays, and Advanced Search. Basic Search consists of a single search box, but it also permits searchers to limit by one or more sections of the database, namely Eyewitness Accounts, Photographs, Propaganda Material, Wiener Library Publications, and Biographical Index Cards (of members of the Nazi Party, military, and SS hierarchies). Search History displays as users work.
The Browse Indexes option allows for the scanning of alphabetical lists of eyewitnesses, propagandists, and subjects of the biographical index cards, plus the names of synagogues from the photography collection. Scholars who know their way around the primary sources should find this particularly useful.
Advanced Search mode offers an expanded search template with the ability to search via a pull-down menu individual fields—Author, Description, Document Number, Document Type, Language, Photo Location, Photo Subject, Publisher, and Titles & Headings Fields. Search boxes may be combined to create Boolean searches using the operators at the end of each row.
The ability to limit a search to a particular Section Heading is repeated here, and date range limiting is added. Users may also enable the Fuzzy Search capability to locate documents producing “near matches” to the terms they’ve entered.
We searched the term “pogrom” with Eyewitness Accounts selected in the Section Headings area for the date range 1889 to 1940 and got 43 hits. (The numbers increased to 46 with the Fuzzy Search level set to Low and to 55 with it set to Medium). Even though many of the documents were in German, they had an English-language title page (“Would the Germans really do anything wicked?”) and a brief contents summary from which the essence of the account could be gleaned. Revising the search with “English” entered in the Language field dropped the number from 55 down to just four items.
The “Pages with hits” feature allows users to zero in on search terms in context (helpful when viewing lengthy full- image documents), though the “Search this item” capability did not produce useful results.
A search on “(kindertransport) AND (section contains(Photographs))” returned a results list of five small collections ranging from six to 11 photos. All were of respectable quality, although as the Introduction notes, image quality of both photos and textual documents can vary.
The resource boasts a full set of search capabilities—truncation and wildcards, Boolean operators, nesting, and proximity searching. Items may be marked for printing (the Print command converts up to ten pages at a time to PDFs) and emailing.
PRICING Gale Digital Collections are one-time purchases with pricing based on institution type and FTE. Union College—with an FTE under 3000—would pay a list price of $3000 for the Testaments collection plus an annual hosting fee of $100. Discounts for customer loyalty, purchasing multiple collections, and signing the purchase contract prior to June 15, 2011, would bring the price down to $2,275. The hosting fee and the pricing for MARC records are based on purchase price. Free trials are available.
END USERS The archives of the world’s first Holocaust memorial institution, TTTH provides insight into the workings of the Nazi regime in Germany and shows the devastating impact on its victims, giving first-person accounts and photographic evidence of all aspects of Jewish life in the ghettos, in the camps, and in exile. It mixes an abundance of primary-source material (much of it exceedingly grim) with early Holocaust scholarship (most notably Wiener Library Bulletin) and so would have no real counterpart in most library collections.
Scholars comfortable working with German-language sources would get the most mileage out of this resource, but the English summaries make it reasonably accessible to a broader range of researchers.
Oxford Scholarship Online: Religion
Oxford University Press;
oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/religion/subject_home.html
CONTENT Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO), a collection of Oxford’s core scholarly ebooks, continues to grow significantly since our last review in 2004, offering research titles within 18 subject areas including Biology, Classical Studies, Linguistics, Music, Philosophy, and Religion. The latest update in January 2011 added 203 titles, bringing the total number of scholarly monographs available in this cross-searchable database to 4,465.
Organized within 15 subdiscipline fields such as Biblical Studies, Church History, Judaism, Religion and Society, and World Religions, the Religion module currently features 629 titles. Publishing original scholarship in all areas of religion and theology, with some older classic works for balance, the file added 100-plus titles this past year. New since 2011 are the following: Jesus and Muhammad ; Divine Evil?: The Moral Character of the God of Abraham; Desiring Conversion; Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism; Being Young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in the Global South and North; and Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth-Century Monk.
Notable features give users access to PDF chapter downloads for every title and chapter, a huge improvement from earlier page unit limitations; automatic export of citations to third-party citation management software; an enhanced customizable section for subscribers; reference linking from bibliographies and footnotes; printer-friendly format throughout; updated MARC21 records by subject; DOIs (at the book and chapter level); OpenURL support; and more.
USABILITY Worth immediate mention is the font-size option. Similar to what’s found in ereaders on the market, this feature allows users to select from three sizes and to readjust the text anytime during the session. As modes of delivery increasingly adapt to the size of the device at hand, we see this as a very significant accessibility move.
Navigation is clear throughout the site, and users can quickly access Author, Title, and Subject indexes, as well as Quick and Advanced Search links from every page. From the opening screen, searchers can select a particular subject from the left navigation frame and drill down to specific subdisciplines if subscribed. All users can view book and chapter abstracts freely.
Oxford fully abstracts both at the book level and at the chapter level, primarily using author-supplied keywords that link to additional OSO titles. This is not a common practice in other ebook collections.
Reading the text is relatively benign, with no proprietary reader software required. No fancy toolset is available for manipulating text, and the interface presents the contents on a scrolling page, with Previous and Next links found at the top and bottom of each page. Original pagination is clearly noted, so users can not only cite a passage correctly but also jump to the exact page desired, especially if they have a citation from another source. In addition, users can access another chapter, or the book’s front and end matter, with the Contents Scroller in the left navigation bar.
A Quick Search (search subject only) on “religion AND sex*” retrieved a set of 26 books and 21 additional chapters. Users can refine their query by entering additional terms to search within results. We added “church,” reducing the results to seven books and three chapters. The default sort is relevance, but sorting by title allows all the chapters from within one title to display together. Author and publication date are additional sort options.
For those needing more, Advanced Search mode offers additional field searching to include Books only, Books and Chapters, and the standard Book Title, Author, Keyword, Abstract, complex Boolean, etc.
The Cross-Reference tool can be used to find a desired term/phrase within other books. We tried this with Oberammergau in the Nazi Era, looking for other instances of “catholic loyalists,” and retrieved two additional books and two chapters.
Another significant improvement, as noted above, is the option to print or save individual chapters as PDFs. Simply select the “full Chapter PDF” link in the left-hand menu of the full-text chapter page, and a PDF is generated for that chapter. In addition to being searchable for later review, it includes a full citation to alleviate “Where did this come from?” syndrome.
PRICING OSO is available for a onetime purchase fee or by annual subscription, either as a full collection or individual subjects. OUP pricing is based on FTE, with discounts for multiple modules. Concurrent-user and unlimited-access pricing options are available. Institutional 30-day trials are offered.
END USERS OSO (along with the wide variety of titles in the collection) offers an impressive catalog of research monographs in this highly competitive ebook market, and the OUP title lists continue to be those that academic libraries consistently acquire. OUP also notifies customers via Advanced Book Information (ABI) sheets which of its print products will be included online to assist with collection decisions. A random sample of ebooks added in 2010 compared with our print holdings indicates significant overlap and a highly relevant title list, giving e-access a possible edge as shelf space dwindles. Subject coverage will appeal to scholars and students alike. Book and chapter-level DOIs are practical for ease of direct linking to readings.
E-SHORT TAKES
Index Islamicus
Brill Academic Publishers; brill.nl/indexislamicus
Available through Brill, ProQuest, and EBSCO, Index Islamicus is an international bibliography of publications on all aspects of Islam, the Middle East, and the Muslim world. Established in 1983 to continue the compilations and publications of the Index Islamicus bibliography and to cover Islamic and Middle Eastern history, beliefs, societies, cultures, and languages, this product contains broad content and includes topics such as archaeology, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and Muslim minorities in the United States. Updated quarterly, the database currently contains 377,000-plus records encompassing more than 3400 journals, with conference proceedings, monographs, multi-authored works, and book reviews. Journals and books are indexed down to the article and author level, and the database is searchable with key indexes, including author, keyword, journal title, publication date, subject, title, and record type. The index is available in print as a journal or yearbook and digitally on CD-ROM or online.
InfoTrac Religion & Philosophy
Gale Cengage Learning; bit.ly/InfoTracReligion
InfoTrac Religion & Philosophy features a custom selection of more than 250 magazines and academic journals addressing religion and related areas of philosophy, archaeology, and anthropology. Coverage—now exceeding 1.1 million articles and updated daily—begins as early as 1980 for indexing and 1983 for full text. With Gale’s PowerSearch platform, users can also access subscribed ebook content from Gale Virtual Reference Library and popular titles from more than 60 partner publishers in addition to the periodical collections, all in one seamless cross-search. A sampling of titles includes Aleph: Historical Studies in Science & Judaism, Christianity and Literature, Journal of Biblical Literature, Harvard Theological Review, New Testament Studies, and Theological Studies.
JSTOR: Religion
JSTOR; jstor.org/action/showJournals#43693421
Within the discipline of Religion, JSTOR currently offers 60 scholarly full-text titles in its Archive Collection (primarily within the Arts & Sciences V collection), including core titles such as The Catholic Historical Review (1915), History of Religion (1961), Journal of Biblical Literature and its preceding title Journal of the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis (1881), Modern Judaism (1981), The Journal of Religion (1921), and more. Subscription prices are based on the Carnegie Classification or population served. A new effort initiated by JSTOR and the University of California Press, the Current Scholarship Program, intends to combine current and historical scholarly content available on a single, integrated platform, including History of Religions and the Journal of Religion . Libraries may subscribe to current issues on a Single Title basis or assemble their own custom collections.
ProQuest Religion
ProQuest; proquest.com/en-US/catalogs/databases/detail/pq_religion.shtml
ProQuest Religion offers content from more than 170 journal titles, most available in full text, presenting coverage from 1986 to the present. The collection includes the studies and commentary on a broad range of religious issues of general interest from the perspectives of many worldwide religions and contains a substantial percentage of titles published outside the United States. Besides the usual scholarly publishing suspects, numerous titles come from independent religious bodies and nondenominational organizations. It also provides access to distinctive core titles not found in other online databases and materials from philosophy, ethics, and international perspectives. Some of the recent titles added illustrate the diversity of content: Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture; Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought; Harvard Theological Review; Hebrew Studies; Journal of Baha’i Studies; and Social Work and Christianity.
Oxford Biblical Studies Online
Oxford University Press; oxfordbiblicalstudies.com
Suitable for scholars as well as secondary students, Oxford Biblical Studies Online provides a comprehensive resource for the study of the Bible and biblical history—integrating authoritative scholarly texts and reference works with tools and resources such as web sites selected by specialists in the field, thematic guides, tables and charts, topical essays, lesson plans, lectionary calendar, and suggested reading lists for further research. With more than 5000 A-to-Z entries and chapters from a variety of Oxford Reference sources (Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Oxford Companion to the Bible, and more), the database includes the New Oxford Annotated Bible, Oxford Study Bible, Jewish Study Bible, Catholic Study Bible, Access Bible, and The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha. Other supplemental Bible Texts include Apocryphal Old Testament, Apocryphal New Testament, Oxford Bible Commentary, Concise Concordance to New Revised Standard Version, and New American Bible Concise Concordance. Users can also access hundreds of searchable images and maps from major scholarly publications, including The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East and the Oxford Bible Atlas.
Religion & Philosophy Collection
EBSCO Publishing; ebscohost.com/public/religion-philosophy-collection
The Religion & Philosophy Collection, a comprehensive full-text database with more than 300 journals, covers topics such as world religions, major denominations, biblical studies, religious history, epistemology, political philosophy, philosophy of language, moral philosophy, and the history of philosophy. More than 250 titles are peer reviewed, and full-text coverage extends from 1975 to the present. Titles include British Journal of Theological Education, European Judaism, Evangelical Quarterly, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, Journal of Progressive Judaism, and Journal for the Study of the Old Testament. In addition to the Religion & Philosophy Collection, EBSCO offers a suite of comprehensive Religion databases, including ATLA Religion (see long review, p. 120), New (and Old) Testament Abstracts Online, Index to Jewish Periodicals, along with the newly released Jewish Studies Source, Christian Periodical Index, and Catholic Periodical and Literature Index Online.
