Finding the right database for your research isn’t always an easy task. While Cornell librarians have helpfully curated a list of databases for individual academic disciplines, it can still be daunting to narrow down the ideal tools for your specific research needs. This is doubly the case when you’re in a multidisciplinary field—if you’re working in, say, gender studies, there’s a good chance that you’ll need to consult both humanities and social science databases.

Some databases, though, are perfectly designed for interdisciplinary approaches. In this edition of Resource Spotlight, I’m featuring Black Studies Center, a powerful research database that covers Black history and culture from numerous scholarly angles. Black Studies Center is a ProQuest product, and while it features that familiar search bar and teal banner, it differs from other entities on the ProQuest platform by combining material types that don’t usually cohabitate within the same database. Among other items, Black Studies Center contains archival materials (Black abolitionist papers and the full-text archives of ten historical Black newspapers, including the 1910-1975 archives of The Chicago Defender); reference materials (including Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, a suite of commissioned essays by Black Studies scholars on key subjects in the field); video and image materials; scholarly journals in the discipline; and a vast index of Black literary works from 1827-1940. In its holistic representation of the field, Black Studies Center is about as comprehensive as a single scholarly database can be.

Figuring out how to navigate this storehouse of information can be a bit challenging, but Black Studies Center has a far more inviting interface than most other ProQuest databases. One of its most exciting features is its interactive timeline from the medieval period to the present, which highlights significant events in Black history—artistic and literary achievements, Civil Rights victories, and geopolitical conflicts, among others—and links to relevant materials in the database. For example, many of the important 1965 entries, such as the assassination of Malcolm X, link to relevant archival photographs, historical newspaper coverage in the mainstream and Black press, and more recent scholarly research on the subject. This tool—through its connecting of reference material to the scholarly and cultural archive—could be an excellent resource for students and instructors alike.

While Black Studies Center is a wonderful platform for browsing, I want to demonstrate how it can also be used effectively for targeted searches. In a recent post on the blog of the Association of College and Research Libraries, Jay Singley discusses how new, AI-integrated tools in library search platforms—because they rely upon third-party services that employ content filtering—tend to bury “controversial” subjects; for example, early users of a new “Research Assistant” service produced by Ex Libris found that they received errors when searching the terms “Tulsa race riot” and “Tulsa race massacre.” As Singley argues, these mechanisms of AI tools “will perpetuate, if not exacerbate, existing biases and suppression of minoritized people.” In the spirit of working against this kind of censorship and algorithmic bias, I decided to use Black Studies Center to explore accounts of the Tulsa race massacre.

Especially given the complicity of white journalists  in stoking the racist violence that would ensue, I was interested in representations of the event in the Black press, and specifically, how it understood the causes behind the massacre. I began with the following search string: Tulsa AND (cause OR responsibility OR responsible). (If I were exploring the same question through a general catalog search—rather than within a database specific to Black Studies—I’d likely have to use a more specific term like “Tulsa race massacre.”) Next, I set the content type to “newspapers” and, since I was primarily interested in discussions of the event in its immediate aftermath, I adjusted the date filter from May 31, 1921 to August 31, 1921. The first result was an editorial from June 11, 1921 in The Chicago Defender that situates the event within the structural context of white supremacy and the Jim Crow Laws—a strikingly different interpretation of the event than accounts we might find in mainstream newspapers, such as this one I uncovered by using the same search string in the ProQuest Historical Newspapers database.

Like other ProQuest platforms, Black Studies Center feels tailor-made for the discovery of useful archival and scholarly sources. But while it is somewhat buried in the database’s interface, the Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience—a selection of 37 topical interdisciplinary essays composed by leading Black Studies scholars—serves as an exceptionally useful reference resource. Ranging from subjects like “African American Labor History” to “Afro-Latinos,” each entry offers a deep, well-researched overview paired with multimedia elements, a timeline, a glossary, and suggestions for recommend reading. While the collection features five essays from 2022—including entries on environmental resistance, police brutality, and Black business history, among others—the majority of the entries are from the mid-aughts. For some subjects—i.e., the entry on “Black Cinema,” which is from 2005—this is a definite downside. Nonetheless, the Schomburg Studies essays offer a much deeper examination than your average general-interest encyclopedia, and—crucially—they can help you quickly identify key interlocuters within longstanding scholarly conversations.

When I’m working at Walk-In Reference at Olin, I always encourage patrons to consult a variety of databases when possible. But if you’re researching anything that intersects with Black history or culture, you could get a lot of mileage out of Black Studies Center alone—it pulls together primary, scholarly, multimedia, and reference resources into a single database. If you have questions about this database, feel free to stop by Walk-In Reference in Olin—or, set up an appointment with a librarian to get help from a subject expert!

If you’re interested in the undercurrents of American culture in the second half of the 20th century, the JSTOR Independent Voices collection might just be the goldmine you’re looking for. An open-source digital database comprised of 22,000 resources, Independent Voices compiles primary source material from the American alternative press—underground newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and literary journals—primarily (though not exclusively) showcasing materials from the 1960s-1980s. It’s part of a larger project called Reveal Digital that, similar to HathiTrust, forms a digital repository sourced from the special collections of a consortium of research libraries.

Independent Voices is divided into subsections that represent a variety of different cultural communities: African Americans; Native Americans; feminists; the Latino community; the LGBT community; college campus subcultures; the anti-war GI community; the right wing; and the literary underground (via “little magazines,” a term for independently produced documents associated with the literary avant-garde).

On a first glance, these might feel like arbitrary divisions—for example, the gay liberation movement obviously collaborated with campus activists, and the literary underground intersected with all the above identity groups. The subsections of Independent Voices, though, have less to do with identarian representation and more with specific alternative press traditions: for example, the “Latino” category corresponds with presses associated with the Chicano Movement; “feminist” largely corresponds with the second-wave feminist networks that went hand-in-hand with feminist bookstores, and so on.

If you combine appropriate keywords with JSTOR’s built-in search filters, Independent Voices can enable some powerful primary source research—and, unlike many other primary source databases, it allows us to examine specific topics across a variety of divergent alternative press communities.

So, what does this look like in practice? Let’s say you’re writing a paper for an FGSS course, and you’re interested in the rhetoric surrounding abortion in the immediate aftermath of the ratification of Roe v. Wade. We might begin with the following keyword string:
Then, using the filters on the left, we can set the date range from 1973-1974. Next—and this is where the subdivisions of Independent Voices get really useful—we can specify which subcollection(s) we want to search within:

Through some experimentation, I was able to yield some very diverse results: a write-up of a Chicana conference in which abortion was discussed (see p. 6); a narrative description of abortion in a feminist short story (see p. 19); and a sobering response to the Roe v. Wade victory that details the way in which legalized abortion is still mediated by the “agreements, conflicts, and comprises of [patriarchal] institutions” (see p. 6). There’s a lot of breadth here! In this way, we might use Independent Voices to understand how history unfolds outside the mainstream across divergent media forms, modalities, and communities.

If you’re working on an assignment that requires you to use news sources, Independent Voices can also provide more a politically radical perspective than you might encounter in mainstream news databases. For example, suppose we want to research media responses to an event that happened on our own campus, the Willard Straight Takeover. (Hey humanities instructors, there’s a free assignment idea!) In addition to consulting standard news sources, the Daily Sun archives, and Rare and Manuscript Collections, we could use Independent Voices to see how the alternative press responded to the event. By searching “Willard Straight,” I came across the following relevant resources: a detailed account of the event in a radical NYC paper (see p. 3); a Seattle alt-weekly that mentions the event in a more general article about student activism (see p. 4); and an article in the San Francisco-based The Movement that praises the takeover as “brilliant” and “instructive for the entire movement” (see p. 11). That’s a level of sympathy that you’re unlikely to find in most mainstream news sources from 1969!

Independent Voices does have some limitations. Probably the most obvious problem is the inability to filter searches for geographic location—which feels like a strange choice, considering that the individual publication records list “place of publication” in their metadata. Additionally, the database doesn’t provide much information about the physical attributes or technologies used to create the individual periodicals—which is a definite limitation for researchers of print history, especially given that many of the publications archived in the “little magazines” subsection were associated  with the mimeograph revolution. Thus, it would be a good idea to do background research on any of the publications in Independent Voices that you choose to cite. Also, the right-wing section of Independent Voices only contains a handful of publications, and this is a definite limitation if you’re interested in studying, say, right-wing responses to ‘60s counterculture.

If you have questions about Independent Voices, other JSTOR collections, or anything else related to your research, please drop us a line!

Zines have a curious relationship with libraries. For the uninitiated, zines—pronounced like zeens—are typically self-published, self-distributed, low-budget pamphlets that have historically served to platform communities outside the mainstream. “Zine” is short for “fanzine,” and most historical narratives of zines tend to suggest that the form originated with science fiction fanzines in the first half of the twentieth century. But the aesthetic traits we tend to most readily associate with zines in a modern context—scrappy, subcultural, and intentionally amateurish—can be most obviously linked to rise of punk rock in the 1970s, and its evolution into hardcore punk in the ‘80s. For punks, zines formed a connective subcultural tissue, giving it a platform that would not have been available in mainstream media forms. But while zines have strong ties to punk culture, they’ve served as a mouthpiece for all kinds of cultural undergrounds and social outcasts. As Stephen Duncombe beautifully puts it in Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of American Culture,

[Zines] are independent and localized, coming out of cities, suburbs and small towns across the USA, assembled on kitchen tables. They celebrate the everyperson in a world of celebrity, losers in a society that rewards the best and the brightest… [Defining] themselves against a society predicated on consumption, zinesters privilege the ethic of DIY, do-it-yourself: make your own culture and stop consuming what is made for you (2).

In one sense, zines might seem inimical to the associations that the general public might have with academic libraries: they’re cheaply made and therefore difficult to preserve; they typically don’t have cataloging-friendly characteristics like spines or ISBNs; and, distinct from the milieu of academic publishing, they tend to resist any fantasy of epistemological authority. Nonetheless, librarians tend to love them. Hundreds of libraries across the United States maintain zine collections; they’re an increasingly popular instructional tool in academic libraries—even at Cornell (check out our LibGuide!); and librarians have developed innovative schemas specifically designed for cataloging zines. In a contemporary context in which digital communication is at the whims of multinational tech corporations—at constant risk of surveillance, and of intellectual theft via generative AI—the print object perhaps has a new allure.

Zines are probably best engaged with in a physical context, and Cornell Library has you covered—check out the zine collection on display in Mann Library, or make an appointment to view some of the myriad zines in Rare and Manuscript Collections documenting everything from Riot Grrrl to witchcraft. In honor of Pride Month, though, I want to highlight one of my favorite online zine resources, the Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP). Comprising around 500 digitized zines—as a well as a smaller number of flyers and other pieces of ephemera—QZAP strives to “to establish a ‘living history’ archive of past and present queer zines and to encourage current and emerging zine publishers to continue to create.” While it includes zines from the 1970s to the 2020s, the 1990s and the 2000s are the archive’s most heavily represented decades; of particular note are its zines on queer punk and “homocore,” as well as its collection of ephemera relating to ACT UP, the grassroots activist organization founded in the late ‘80s in response to governmental inaction towards the AIDS epidemic.

While QZAP is searchable by keyword and has an advanced search feature, the archive is small enough that browsing is the most expedient (and fun) way to make new discoveries. The landing page allows for browsing by author, location, and year—among other categories—and once you find a zine that looks interesting, the “keywords” section of the individual catalog records encourage deep exploration.

Given the fundamentally horizontal nature of zine culture—unlike peer-reviewed scholarship, it’s not shaped around a stratified “canon” or system of prestige—this aspect of QZAP is particularly valuable. For example, while looking at Homopunk World #6—a fascinating document of queer punk culture—I clicked on the “gay marriage” keyword, which yielded several other zines that took a critical, anti-assimilationist approach to gay marriage. Importantly, this tool foregrounds the way in which zines—like all forms of knowledge production—are not made within a social vacuum. Rather, they’re produced through a networked conversation with other thinkers, creators, and socio-cultural forces.

While zines continue to be a vibrant creative form, they arguably serve a different role now than they did in eras that predated contemporary digital technologies—whether artificial intelligence, social media, or the internet itself—and one of the most appealing aspects of QZAP is the breadth of topics its archive represents. It includes zines on home ownership for punks; on HIV testing in the foster care system; on herbalism for trans women. There’s even a lesbian coloring book, and a zine called Emily Dickinson Was a Fucking Ninja. Maybe you’ll find something in QZAP that will inspire you to make a zine of your own—as the punks like to say, “D.I.Y. or die!”

If you’re an instructor interested in incorporating zines into the classroom, or if you’re a student looking to research zines, consider making an appointment with a Cornell librarian. We’d love to help!

If you’re interested in purchasing some zines from queer creators, here’s a few excellent zine distros that you might consider checking out: Portland Button Works; Wasted Ink Zine Distro; and Brown Recluse (zines by and for BIPOC creators).

This is the first entry in a new series that showcases databases, archival collections, and other research resources at Cornell Library and beyond.

Maybe you’re a student working on an essay for a first-year writing seminar about 1960s youth subcultures. Maybe you’re a faculty member who wants to provide an accessible introduction to archival discoveries in the classroom. Or maybe, like me, you’re just a huge nerd who likes to explore primary source materials from the rock underground.

Whatever the case may be, you’re bound to find something interesting in Rock’s Backpages: The Ultimate Library of Rock Music Writing and Journalism, an online database accessible through Cornell Library that offers a massive full-text collection of rock-related writing from 1948 to the present. Despite its name, Rock’s Backpages does not exclusively cover rock music, but rather, pretty much anything that falls under the umbrella of “popular” music—from boy bands, to reggae, to EDM, to emo, to rap. Its archive collects articles from a wide range of publication types: general-interest newspapers; well-known music publications like Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Pitchfork; and magazines from the golden age of rock journalism like Crawdaddy! and Cream, to name a few. In addition, a longstanding project of Rock’s Backpages is its ongoing collection of 800 original audio interviews with rock icons—an assortment of luminaries as various as Bob Dylan, Jeff Mangum, Madonna, and Ol’ Dirty Bastard—many of which are transcribed and searchable.

Rock’s Backpages has a terrific browsing interface, allowing users to explore its archives by artist, writer, genre, publication, and—perhaps most interestingly—by subject (e.g., “novelty records,” “drugs and alcohol,” “LGBTQ+,” etc.). This makes it an especially useful tool for glossing the critical conversation surrounding a specific musical artist over time. For example, I can trace the evolution of Black Flag’s reception from their early notoriety; to their affront towards “orthodox punks” in the mid-‘80s; to their eventual canonization.

The ease of its interface, which places every browsable category on a single scrollable page, also allows for fun, strange discoveries, such as this review of an apparently awful novelty album from The Simpsons which the reviewer derides as a commodity for “the affluent (and stoopid) kids of middle America.” And while probably the strongest suit of Rock’s Backpages is its ability to crawl the archives of the pre-internet rock underground, it’s still useful for finding more contemporary commentary on music and the music industry, such as this article on the effects of AI on music journalism.

While Rock’s Backpages is great for browsing and offers a unique selection of thematic categories, its Advanced Search interface isn’t very, well, “advanced.” It only provides one field, and when I attempted to search using Boolean operators—a fancy librarian phrase for keywords that string together multiple terms—the results were less than stellar. For example, when I looked for writing on the Grateful Dead’s famous show in Barton Hall, the search string ‘Grateful Dead’ AND ‘Cornell’ yielded a bunch of articles about both the Grateful Dead and Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell. If you’re doing research that involves looking for specific mentions of phrases or keywords, you might be better off using a different database. Nonetheless, Rock’s Backpages is a very fun resource and—in certain use cases—is potentially very powerful.

If you have questions about Rock’s Backpages or anything else related to the research process, stop by Olin Library Walk-In Reference during our operational hours, or sign up to Meet with a Librarian!