Guides by Subject
The following databases are newly acquired or being evaluated for a future subscription.
Africa Commons is a platform for discovering African historical and cultural materials held by organizations around the world. UCSB has access to the following modules:
- History and Culture: Searches across over 500,000 documents from over 4,000 collections and over 600 organizations, including libraries, museums, and archives, and links outward to the web repositories where the documents are located.
- Black South African Magazines: Digitized archives of 7 popular magazines of the mid-20th century, including Zonk!, Zonk! Film-Pic Photo Stories, Contrast, The Townships Housewife, Grace, Hi-Note!, and Drum.
- Southern African Films and Documentaries: Over 100 films spanning the 1900s to the 2000s, including newsreels, propaganda, documentaries, feature films, and interviews.
- East African Magazines, Newspapers, and Films: The Hilary Ng’weno Archive: Over 70 historical documentaries and digitized archives of Rainbow Children's Magazine, The Weekly Review, and The Nairobi Times, all created and edited by journalist Hilary Ng’weno.
Primary source materials published 1829-1922, covering the history of African American life and religious organizations.
Produced by the American Psychological Association, this database provides access to thousands of test instruments, most of which are available for immediate download and use in teaching and research.
A full-text archive of magazines comprising key research material in the fields of art and architecture, dating from the late-nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Subjects covered include fine art, decorative arts, architecture, interior design, industrial design, and photography. The issues are presented as full-color page images; detailed article-level indexing permits quick, efficient searching and navigation of this material.
Coverage of the Asian American experience sourced from American and global newspapers, including Asian American newspapers. Provides full-text searching as well as access to content by Topic, Event, and Eras in Asian American History.
BabelScores® looks into and selects the works of the most creative, original and innovative composers of the past few decades offering a wide catalogue and setting up a powerful circulation platform addressed to instrumentalists, ensembles, orchestras, composers, musicologists, conservatories, universities and festivals throughout the world.
The Berliner Philharmoniker Digital Concert Hall Provides access to live performances of the Berlin Philharmonic, as well as hundreds of concerts recorded over more than 50 years. The site also offers interviews, documentary films, and opera performances.
Collection of approximately 100,000 pages of non-fiction writings by major American black leaders—teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other figures—covering 250 years of history. In addition to the most familiar works, Black Thought and Culture presents previously inaccessible material, including letters, speeches, prefatory essays, political leaflets, interviews, periodicals, and trial transcripts. The ideas of over 1,000 authors present an evolving and complex view of what it is to be black in America.
Provides access to primary documents, images, and video covering worldwide border areas, including: U.S. and Mexico, the European Union, Afghanistan, Israel, Turkey, The Congo, Argentina, China, Thailand, and others.
Brings together archives, video, and other primary sources for the study of history, media, the arts, political science, education, and other areas where the contributions of the disability community are typically overlooked.
DRAM Contains American music represented by the New World Records and CRI label(s), which merged in 2007. From folk to opera, Native American to jazz, 19th century classical to early rock, musical theater, contemporary, electronic and beyond, New World has served composers, artists, students and the general public since its inception in 1975 with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
This interdisciplinary collection of multimedia materials brings together primary source documents, archives, films, text and photographs to support the study of key environmental challenges and events from the 20th and 21st centuries, including climate change, water/air pollution, biodiversity, conservation, agriculture, deforestation and more.
Fire Insurance Maps online, produced by Historical Information Gatherers (HIG), provides user-friendly access to a unique and extensive historical map collection. These Fire Insurance Maps (FIMs) date from roughly 1875-1950s, and maps are high resolution color where available. California content includes maps primarily published by Sanborn, as well as several other publishers.
Gateway to North America: People, Places, and Organizations of 19th-Century New York from the New-York Historical Society, features content from residential and business directories, organization records, urban guidebooks, and other sources rich in names and places that present a history of the people of New York City from the late eighteenth century through the early twentieth century.
History Commons is a platform for discovering digitized historical and cultural materials.
Foreign primary legal sources form 1600 to 1970.
Provides researchers with instant, full-text access to foreign, comparative, and international legal literature. Gathers together titles across individual volumes that address issues in the realms of foreign, comparative, Islamic, Jewish, and even Roman and ancient law.
Focuses on the first 90 years of the federal appellate court system's history. Chronicles the evolution of the appellate courts, providing a deeper understanding of social, economic, political, and historical issues from 1891 until the start of the Reagan era in 1980.
Provides a comprehensive full-text collection of Anglo-American legal treatises. Covers nearly every aspect of American and British law and encompasses a broad array of the analytical, theoretical, and practical literature for research in U.S. and British legal history. Includes casebooks, local practice manuals, form books, works for lay readers, pamphlets, letters, speeches, and other works from the most influential writers and legal thinkers of the time.
Provides access to four centuries of American legal primary sources. Includes published records of the American colonies; federal, state, territorial, and municipal codes; constitutional conventions and compilations; and other resources.
Contains documents from trials in the United States, Britain and other English-speaking jurisdictions. Includes unofficially published accounts of trials; official trial documents, briefs, and arguments; and official records of legislative proceedings, administrative proceedings, and arbitration sessions.
Contains a comprehensive online collection of records and briefs brought before the nation's highest court by leading legal practitioners-many who later became judges and associates of the court.
Met Opera on Demand offers users instant access to more than 500 full-length Metropolitan Opera performances, including stunning HD videos from the Met's award-winning Live in HD series of movie theater transmissions, classic telecasts from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and hundreds of radio broadcasts dating back to 1935.
This collection features full-text periodicals depicting American musical life from 1838 to the early 1900s through local and international news, reviews, editorials, sheet music, and advertisements. Users can also cross-search the full text of all articles with videos, audio recordings, photographs, scores, and reference texts.
Policy Commons is a one-stop community platform for objective, fact-based research with more than 25 million pages of curated, high quality policy reports, briefs, analyses, working papers, and datasets from the world’s leading policy experts, nonpartisan think tanks, IGOs and NGOs.
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global is a full-text database of doctoral dissertations and master's theses from institutions around the world. In addition to accessing ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global on the ProQuest platform, UCSB users may search ProQuest Dissertations & Theses on the Web of Science platform. Web of Science includes citation indexing for each dissertation and thesis, connecting them to the Web of Science citation network and allowing users to explore their citation connections to other research on the Web of Science platform. When the full dissertation or thesis is available on the ProQuest platform, the Web of Science record includes a link to it.
To search only dissertations and theses completed at UCSB please use eScholarship.
Comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses from around the world, including millions of works from thousands of universities.
This database contains 3 million literature citations from thousands of journals, monographs, dissertations, and more than 500,000 primary works. These include rare and obscure texts, multiple versions, and non-traditional sources like comics, theatre performances, and author readings. It also includes book reviews and criticism related to this content.
Collection of primary source document collections and curatorial essays aimed at students and scholars of queer history and culture. The database uses “queer” in its broadest and most inclusive sense, to embrace topics that are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender and to include work on sexual and gender formations that are queer but not necessarily LGBT.
Contains complete state laws in session law form (i.e. chronological, pre-code form), for all 50 U.S. states back to their date of inception. Also includes colonial territory (i.e. pre-statehood) laws for many states, Acts of the Parliament of Canada, and links to federal session laws from the HeinOnline U.S. Statutes at Large library.
A platform for discovering South Asian historical and cultural materials held by organizations around the world. Indexes books, magazines, reports, historical journals, video, audio, zines, newspapers, magazines, letters, diaries, and other primary source materials.
A project to build the largest full text repository of quality South Asian books, magazines, reports, historical journals, video, audio, zines, newspapers, magazines, letters, diaries, and other primary source materials.
Provides access to documents focused on women's perspectives in world history, with a particular emphasis on colonized and Indigenous voices.
Documents feminist activism related to development efforts of women in the Global South and their allies working to balance economic growth and social improvement while navigating equity and fairer allocation of resources. Includes essays by scholars in the field that outline and critique shifts in approaches to development, including that of a gendered “post-development” perspective.