American History & Culture Online: Sabin Americana, 1500‐1926 is Thomson Gale's digitization of Joseph Sabin's massive, pioneering national bibliography, Bibliotheca Americana: Dictionary of Books Relating to America, from Its Discovery to the Present Time, originally published from 1868‐1936. The Sabin: Americana database currently includes some six million pages, the full text of over 29,000 of the books, pamphlets, speeches and other primary sources, including some serials. Libraries owning the original texts include major collections of Americana. The present collection derives from the Primary Source Media microfiche editions. Further titles are scheduled to be added for the next several years. InfoTrac serves as the search interface; information on data digitization is found in the Help section. Metadata come from MARC records for the original volumes.
This database follows the trend toward digitizing essential research materials. Sabin's original project predated personal computers, electronic mail, and national archival or union catalogues; it included publications from North, Central and South America, the Arctic, and Antarctica, and works about the Americas published elsewhere, distinguishing it from other classic US national bibliographies. (Some overlap with texts in those bibliographies is to be expected.) Further details are in the fact sheet at www.gale.com/Sabin/Sabinfactsheet.pdf
The Thomson Gale database is uncluttered, prominently displaying Help and Search Tips links. Search options include Basic and Advanced (Boolean), plus author and title browsing. Fuzzy searching is useful for variants in older texts and multiple languages. Basic search fields include full text, keyword, author, title, and Library of Congress subject. Advanced search options include the person as subject, Library of Congress geographic subjects, front matter, main text body, printed indexes in the originals, publisher, place of publication, and the library holding the copy reproduced. Advanced Search limiters include the year of publication, serial publication title, language, Thomson Gale document number, MARC record number, or Sabin collection number.
Search options include types of illustrations, historical periods and broad topics such as ethnic groups, immigration, race, religion, science, slavery, and travel. Proximity searching facilitates locating works actually relevant to one's topic. Results lists can be sorted by author, title, and publication date. The results page provides links to an occurrence of a search term in the text, a full table of contents with links, and a full bibliographic citation. Further search information and details about search paths, data digitization, metadata, technical support, and obtaining permission to reproduce materials appear in the Help section. Further project information appears at www.gale.com/Sabin/find.htm and drawbacks include some omissions of key works that were not known to Sabin or later compilers, and some errors of character transcription. Subject headings are useful, but users will wish to use keywords as well. Given that they are published historic works, some titles may be available from other sources. Alexander Street has published several databases that cover some of the same ground: however, Thomson‐Gale's easy searching may be more accessible to inexperienced students, and the basis in a widely‐held bibliography helps to make the work known to scholars.
Large public libraries and academic libraries in all liberal arts and comprehensive universities should consider this or a similar database for purchase, depending on their needs for historical sources as teaching materials for history and the social sciences, especially for sources accessible by beginning students. Potential users include both faculty and graduate and undergraduate students in history, historical anthropology, political science, natural sciences, history of science, geography, agricultural history, economic history, literature, and the history of law.
