Sources for book reviews

 

Book reviews (PAPER sources):

 

Book review digest (New York [etc.] The H. W. Wilson Company.)

 

Contains excerpts of book reviews that appear in a select list of magazines and journals.  Please check the volume for the year that a book was published, as well as the volume for the succeeding year.  This is because a book might be reviewed over two (or more?) given years. 

 

 Location:            UMS TJ COM1    Z1219 .C95

 Library has:       1905-1970

 

 Location:            UMS TJ REF INDEX    Z1219 .C95

 Library has:       1971-

 

Contemporary literary criticism. (Published Detroit, Gale Research Co. [c1973-)

Contains large amounts of excerpts from book reviews and what critics have said about an author and his/her works. The excerpts can be quite substantial. However, it only concentrates on anthropologists who also have a lot of popular interest/appeal. The main focus is on literature and not the works of anthropologists per se.

Location: UMS TJ REF PN771 .C59
Library has: v.1-

Book review index : a master cumulation (Detroit, Mich. : Gale Research Co., 1980-)

 

            Less years of coverage than Book review digest and NO excerpts of reviews.  But indexes reviews from a much, much larger selection of magazines and journals.

 

 Location:            UMS TJ REF INDEX    Z1035.A1 B62

 Library has:       1965-84,1985-

 

Book reviews (ONLINE):

 

The following databases also offer book reviews although their search interfaces vary, and their years of coveage vary also.  Please ask for help at the reference desk!

 

The following databases contain article in full-text:

 

            JSTOR - Contains 17 anthropology journals in full-text, with some of the material going back to the 1800s. Please note that the Advanced Search interface contains a limit for book reviews.

 

            Academic Search Premier  with  MasterFILE Premier – Together these two databases index some journals as far back as 1965. They both contain A LOT of full-text, much of it reproduced in PDF format. Academic Search Premier is designed specifically for academic institutions. It is a scholarly, multi-disciplinary, database containing the full-text for nearly 4,600 scholarly publications, including more than 3,500 peer-reviewed publications. In addition to the full-text this database offers indexing and abstracting for all 8,052 journals in its collection. There is A LOT of quality social science/anthropology coverage in this database. In contrast, MasterFILE Premier indexes less scholarly, more popular-interest literature. Though less scholarly much of this literature may contain useful biographical information. MasterFILE Premier also includes nearly 650 full text reference books and 84,074 biographies.

 

               Art Full Text 9/84-present  - Full-Text coverage begins in 1997.

 

Important databases that are NOT full-text and which index anthropological literature and contain book reviews:

 

·        Anthropology Plus. This index provides extensive worldwide indexing of journal articles, reports, commentaries, edited works, and obituaries in the fields of social, cultural, physical, biological, and linguistic anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, folklore, material culture, and interdisciplinary studies. The index offers excellent coverage of all core periodicals in the field in addition to local and lesser-known journals. Coverage is from the late 19th century to the present.

 

Electronic databases of interest to anthropology:

 

ANY of the databases mentioned immediately above.  Also, the below databases are relevant:

 

 

Electronic databases of interest for biographical material

 

BGMI (Biography and Genealogy Master Index)

This is a comprehensive index to more than 12.7 million biographical sketches in more than 3,400 volumes and editions of current and retrospective reference books, covering both contemporary and historical figures throughout the world. It indexes everything from substantial articles in subject encyclopedias to very spare descriptions in Who's Who publications (of which there are many different kinds). BGMI is a good place to find information about persons who may be well-known in their discipline yet be obscure otherwise.

Contemporary Authors

This is a bio-bibliographical guide to current writers in fiction, general nonfiction, poetry, journalism, drama, motion pictures, television, and other fields. Provides complete biographical and bibliographical references for more than 90,000 authors in the United States and around the world.

Current Biography, 1940-

This is a FULL-TEXT database that contains 1,500-4,500 word biographies of important people in all fields of endeavor, including but not limited to, government, science, art, business, sports, law, literature, journalism, television, theater, and film. The biographies are enhanced with recent citations from Biography Index (UMS TJ REF INDEX CT100 .B5x). Also in the database are obituaries of people who were profiled in Current Biography. This index contains many useful but frequently dated biographies of select anthropologists. The vast majority of professionaly prominent anthropologists WILL NOT be covered in this index!

 

Select paper social science encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc., of interest to anthropology in the Reference area of the Thomas Jefferson Library

 
Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology REF GN 20 .B56 2004
Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social Thought REF H41. B53 1993
Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology REF GN25 .C65 1994
Dictionary of Anthropology REF GN 11 .D48 1986
Dictionary of Concepts in Cultural Anthropology REF GN 307.W56 1991
Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology (4 vols.) REF GN 307.E53 1991
Encyclopedia of World Cultures (10 vols.) REF GN 307.E53 1991
Handbook of North American Indians (multi-volume set) REF E 76.2 .H36
International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences REF H41 .I58 2001
International encyclopedia of the social sciences : biographical supplement REF H40.A2 I5 1968 Suppl.
National Faculty Directory REF L901 .N34
Social Science Encyclopedia REF H41.S63 1996
Human Relations Area Files (HRAF)

 

 

 

Human Relations Area Files (HRAF)

An outstanding microfiche source of ethnograhpic information.
This resource is also available online. Please see below.

 

Finding information using HRAF files is a multi-step process. 

 

To find a world culture:

 

1)      Consult the front of the book Outline of World Cultures (Ref GN 345.3 H85x 1975 in the Reference area of the Thomas Jefferson Library) to see if your world culture is covered by the HRAF microfiche set.

 

2)      If your culture is in the HRAF set, then find its letter/number code. At the very front of the Outline of World Cultures you will find a checklist of those cultures for which the library has fiche (the library does not have the entire HRAF set, and we stopped getting the fiche in 1988).

 

3)      Go to the microfiche cabinet in CP/M (fifth floor) and look up the files with the call number GT 17 .H8.  Your HRAF files will be listed by their letter/number code.

 

To find information about a world culture by subject:

 

1)      Once you've found the letter/number code for your culture:

 

-         consult the Outline of Cultural Materials (Ref GN 345.3 H84x 1961).   

 

-         The table of contents of this book has a numbered list of categories that will let you find information about a specific aspect of your culture in a particular file of the set.  For example, the category number 584 stands for "Arranging a marriage" (by the way, not every culture in the library's HRAF fiche set necessarily contains every "cultural material" number).

 

NOTE: A particular sheet on the fiche usually has several category numbers scribbled in the margins, meaning that each section (often a paragraph but sometimes less) has been analyzed and given an appropriate cateogry number. So, for as many category numbers as there are on a given sheet, that many copies of the sheet will be found in the entire set for the culture group! Thus if a sheet has six category numbers scrawled in the margins, then that sheet will have been reproduced at least six times throughout the set, one sheet for each category number.

If one wants to read all the text-sources in full (i.e., and not find them scattered throughout all the other fiche) one can go to category 116 of a given fiche set. In category 116 all of the text-sources are reproduced in unbroken form.

For more information on using the HRAF files consult the following: