Religion: June 2006 Archives

Let's say you're researching the Christian response to globalization in Latin America and you need some current information on the countries of Argentina, Chile, and Peru. Or you're studying Judaism in contemporary Russia, or Islam in Indonesia, and you need to know more about those countries. Maybe the size of the economy and its major sectors are important, or the legal system and its support for civil and religious rights, or the size of the population and the number of different ethnic groups.

For these and other reasons, there is often a need for up-to-date and reliable country information. Temple has just the source for you: Europa World (available from the A-Z database list), an online product based on the print Europa World Year Book which has been published since 1989. This online source covers over 250 countries and territories. Look up the entry for Peru from the dropdown box in the upper right corner of the homepage. You’ll get links to Country Map, Country Flag, Country Profile, Country Statistics, Directory: Government and Politics; Directory: Society and Media; and Directory: Business and Commerce. You can even choose Comparative Statistics to compare Peru to other countries.

You can also find country information on the Web by searching for "country studies" or "country information" in any of the major search engines. Two web sites of particular note are Country Studies from the Library of Congress, and the CIA World Factbook.

The library has recently added the online version of Index Islamicus to our databases.

Index Islamicus Online is the premier database supporting the field of Islamic Studies. An international source for articles, books, and conference proceedings, Index Islamicus is a key resource for anyone studying Islam, the Middle East, and the Muslim world. Along with Arabic countries, it includes coverage of Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and other areas of the world with Muslim populations, like the United States, France, and Great Britain. Subject matter goes back to the ancient and medieval world and will be a useful interdisciplinary resource for historians, art historians, philosophers, theologians, and classicists. Over 3000 journals in multiple languages are monitored for inclusion and records go all the way back to 1906. Index Islamicus offers a basic and an advanced search. One of its most useful features is the ability to select subject descriptors from a bibliographic record and perform a new search with just those selected descriptors. Full text linking and links into Temple’s library catalog Diamond are provided, but the database itself has no full text content and no abstracts. Records can be easily exported to the bibliographic utility Refworks.