Welcome to Library Notes for Political Science, a site designed to promote communication between the McGill University Library and the Political Science department.
Here you will find:
Comments and recommendations are welcomed.
The library now has a short trial for the statistics portal Statista. It integrates data sets from over 10,000 sources onto a single platform.
Data sources include:
The focus is on financial data, but other topics include health, crime, labour, immigration, and other social indicators.
Registration is now open for the library’s MyResearch seminar series. To sign up, visit http://www.mcgill.ca/gps/students/skillsets/research/myresearch/
This spring, we are offering a condensed version of the series so that you can complete all modules in one week: May 7-11.
MyResearch is a suite of workshops for graduate and postdoctoral students designed to equip you with essential research skills and knowledge about the various ways the library can support your research. Each workshop is two hours long with plenty of hands-on practice.
Topics cover the beginning of the research process, including refining of research topic, right through to ways to enter the research community, all the while highlighting the Library’s resources and services:
• Module 1: EndNote Essentials
• Module 2: Graduate Research Tool Kit
• Module 3: Search Strategies & Techniques
• Module 4: Getting Your Research Out
The World Bank has announced a new open access policy that will make all of its data and publications freely available online. Moreover, the content will have Creative Commons licenses, permitting reuse of the work as long as the original source is credited. While much of the information was already freely available, this overarching policy will make all of the content more accessible.
From the press release:
WASHINGTON, April 10, 2012 – The World Bank today announced that it will implement a new Open Access policy for its research outputs and knowledge products, effective July 1, 2012. The new policy builds on recent efforts to increase access to information at the World Bank and to make its research as widely available as possible. As the first phase of this policy, the Bank launched today a new Open Knowledge Repository and adopted a set of Creative Commons copyright licenses.
The new Open Access policy, which will be rolled out in phases in the coming year, formalizes the Bank’s practice of making research and knowledge freely available online. Now anybody is free to use, re-use and redistribute most of the Bank’s knowledge products and research outputs for commercial or non-commercial purposes.
“Knowledge is power,” World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick said. “Making our knowledge widely and readily available will empower others to come up with solutions to the world’s toughest problems. Our new Open Access policy is the natural evolution for a World Bank that is opening up more and more.”
The library has a new subscription to Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory. It is not yet listed in our catalogue, but you can read recent issues through this direct link.
From the publisher’s description:
Theoria is an engaged, multidisciplinary and peer-reviewed journal of social and political theory. Its purpose is to address, through scholarly debate, the many challenges posed to intellectual life by the major social, political and economic forces that shape the contemporary world. Thus it is principally concerned with questions such as how modern systems of power, processes of globalization and capitalist economic organization bear on matters such as justice, democracy and truth.
A group of McGill Law students have created a critical guide to coursepack practices—and alternatives: Crack the Coursepack. Complete with comics! The project poses the following questions:
How does copyright regulate the movement of ideas in universities today? How much do we pay for acquiring knowledge, and to whom? What are alternatives to the coursepack, the traditional means of giving students course materials?
A note about the IndiaStat database: unlike most of McGill’s resources, it requires a user name and password, which you can obtain from the Electronic Data Resource Service’s webpage.
Another new document collection from Gale!
Democracy in Turkey, 1950-1959: Records of the U.S. State Department Classified Files “provides access to unique primary source materials on the political, economic and social development of Turkey during a period of democratization in the 1950s.”
The database presents digitized declassified documents that range from special reports and court proceedings to interviews, diplomats’ personal correspondence, and translated newspaper reports.
New journal now available through Project MUSE:
Region: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia
Region is a peer-reviewed international journal that explores the history and current political, economic, and social affairs of the entire former Soviet bloc. In particular, the journal focuses on various facets of transformation at the local and national levels in the aforementioned regions, as well as the changing character of their relationships with the rest of the world in the context of globalization, a perspective that stresses both local adaptation to global phenomena and that adaptation’s transnational or even global significance.
I posted a note about the Canadian Public Policy Collection a couple of years back, so I thought it was time for a reminder!
The collection is a set of online books and other publications from Canadian public policy institutes, government agencies, advocacy groups, think-tanks, universities, research centres, and public interest groups. Publishers include McGill-Queen’s University Press, Broadview Press, Canadian Policy Research Networks, the Institute for Research on Public Policy, the government of Canada, and the Canadian Human Rights Commission, among many others.
According to the advertised count, the collection includes over 20,000 titles.
Keyword searches in the collection retrieve results that can be sorted on both the title and individual chapter levels. Note, though, that basic searches tend to come up with an overwhelming number of results because the full text of the documents is being searched. More precise results can be found by using the standardized subject words or browsing by topic, publisher, etc.
The collection is a part of the “ebrary” platform, so e-books in other collections can also be found in the same interface.
Another new resource of note: Middle East Online, two primary source document collections from the British National Archives and other sources in the U.K.
From the official descriptions:
Series One Arab-Israeli Relations 1917-1970 offers the widest range of original source material from the Foreign Office, Colonial Office, War Office and Cabinet Papers from the 1917 Balfour Declaration through to the Black September war of 1970-1. Here major policy statements are set out in their fullest context, the minor documents and marginalia revealing the workings of colonial administration and, following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, British diplomacy towards Israel and the Arab states.
Series Two Iraq 1914-1974, offers a broad range of original source material from the Foreign Office, Colonial Office, War Office and Cabinet Papers covering the period from the Anglo-Indian landing in Basra in 1914 through the British Mandate in Iraq of 1920-32 to the rise of Saddam Hussein in 1974. Here major policy statements and other working documents are set out in context, the minor documents and marginalia revealing the workings of the mandate administration, diplomacy, treaties, oil and arms dealing. Photographs and colour maps, as well as contemporary film, help bring this vital strand of modern history to life.
