History News: August 2006 Archives

ProQuest recently announced improvements to the Digital National Security Archive (DNSA). Significant enhancements include:

-- Faster, simpler searching via a Quick Search box
-- Easy bookmarking of content via durable URLs for reading lists and course web pages
-- Quick results review supported by hit-term highlighting in the full record display
-- Seamless emailing and printing records through a marked list
-- Easy saving of content and bibliographic records between work sessions through an individual MyArchive feature and citation software support

--David C. Murray

A partnership between the Philadelphia City Archives and the for-profit Avencia, Inc. has resulted in the creation of Phillyhistory.org, a website that provides users with an extensive online photo archive, historic streets index, and index to print photographs held in the Archives. According to Avencia, the site now provides access to "more than 20,000 scanned historic images" of Philadelphia (Avencia.com).

--David C. Murray

The recently released version 4.1 of America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts includes:

-Cross-database searching between Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life
-User-friendly searching, including inverted author names and punctuation alternatives
-Ability for users to save search histories to a personal profile
-Natural language date searching, in addition to the traditional decade and century searching
-Speed improvements for faster searching
-A display option for expanding all of a user's search result records at once
-Addition of a "print-this-entry" option for each record in a search results display
-Ability to easily limit searches to English language entries only
-OpenURL-support for book entries in the Historical Abstracts database

--Brian Schoolar (Electronic Resources Librarian)