Collections

New Smithsonian Primary Sources in U.S. History: Lively, First Person, and Real

Posted on May 26, 2016

Primary sources have been called snippets of history – small windows that show a picture of one moment in time. A letter, a memoir, a personal account – each provides a unique, often personal perspective. And when they are put together in a meaningful way, they create a full and rich picture of historical events, people, and developments while supporting national learning standards.

By directly engaging with artifacts and individual records, students can explore, analyze, and delve more deeply into a topic.  In addition, primary sources help students:

  • Develop critical thinking skills by examining meaning, context, bias, purpose, point of view, and more.
  • Pursue independent learning as they construct knowledge by interacting with sources that represent different accounts of the same event/topic.
  • Understand how viewpoints and biases affect interpretation of history.

Read moreNew Smithsonian Primary Sources in U.S. History: Lively, First Person, and Real

InfoTrac: Environmental Studies and Policy: A “Solid” and “Viable” Collection

Searching for a “solid” resource of “considerable substance” to answer inquiries about environmental concerns? Your search ends here with the InfoTrac: Environmental Studies and Policy Collection, featuring over 5.4 million articles and “more searching flexibility than that of most platforms.” Engage and support students with an easily searchable, mobile-responsive design and integrated Google Apps for Education tools.

Read a review from Library Journal, April, 2016

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Discovering History Through Digital Newspaper Collections

Posted on March 2, 2016

By Seth Cayley

Can cocaine really cure sea-sickness? Something tells me that very little peer-reviewed research has been done on the subject in recent years. But that didn’t stop the Victorians. From around 1870-1915 a large number of narcotics, including heroin, were widely and legally available, and often packaged as medicines. Historians have dubbed this period before the first international drug control treaties as “The Great Binge”.

I first came across The Great Binge when browsing through bound volumes of the Illustrated London News for the first time at university. While I was supposed to be looking for news items about pre-First World War Europe, my eyes kept on being drawn to the adverts. Leafing through these, I learnt that: smoking Joy’s cigarettes could help with bronchitis; a certain brand of men’s underwear does not shrink; and that an electric hairbrush could cure my “nervous headache” (although I was pretty certain my headache that day had other causes common to students).

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Grow Your Nonfiction Collection with Britannica Digital Learning Titles

Posted on September 2, 2015

Easy to search and highly visual nonfiction titles from Britannica Digital Learning can be a resource for your libraries and classrooms to help meet the education research needs for students of all ages. Available on Gale’s award-winning GVRL platform, students can take advantage of popular tools like automatic citation generation highlighting, annotation and more.

Read moreGrow Your Nonfiction Collection with Britannica Digital Learning Titles