Primary Source Collections: Gale

The Egan Library is proud to announce some additions to our digital collections.

• Sabin Americana is a digital archive of primary sources from the Americas years 1500-1926.
• U.S. Declassified Documents Online.
• American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society

These primary source databases are unique, in that they offer the ability to do textual analysis, a deeper reading of the documents. They each have special visual search tool features including:

1. Topic Finder-- a way to visualize connections between search topics, and
2. Term Frequency-- an analysis tool that allows you to note trends in search terms over time.

Topic Finder is a visual search which takes the titles, subjects, and approximately the first 100 words from a subset of your top results and feeds them into an algorithm. Keywords shown in the graphics are those found most often in the text with your search term.

The WHEEL

TILES

Term Frequency is an analysis tool that allows you to note trends in search terms over time within the collection. In the example below, we see the terms terrorist and terrorism were most frequently found in the classified documents in the years 1965 and 1986. Researchers can add rows for additional terms and define a range of years to analyze.

This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services [LS-250194-OLS-21].