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Information Center: About Black Studies Center

Black Studies Center brings together essential historical and current material for researching the past, present and future of African-Americans, the wider African Diaspora, and Africa itself. It is comprised of several cross-searchable component databases.

Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience

At the heart of Black Studies Center is Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience. This unique database examines interdisciplinary topics on the African experience throughout the Americas via in-depth essays accompanied by detailed timelines along with important research articles, images, film clips and more. The essays are contributed by leading academic experts who have surveyed and analysed the most important existing research literature in their respective fields.

International Index to Black Periodicals (IIBP)

IIBP includes current and retrospective bibliographic citations and abstracts from scholarly journals and newsletters from the United States, Africa and the Caribbean, and full-text coverage of core Black Studies periodicals. See this journal title list (Excel format) for periodicals included. Most IIBP records in the current coverage contain an abstract, and additionally many IIBP records contain the corresponding full text of the original article. Coverage is international in scope and multidisciplinary, spanning cultural, economic, historical, religious, social, and political issues of vital importance to the Black Studies discipline. The journal list was prepared with the guidance of an advisory board including librarians specializing in Black Studies: Carol A. Rudisell, Associate Librarian, University of Delaware Library and Dorothy Ann Washington, Librarian, Black Cultural Center, Purdue University.

The Marshall Index was compiled by Albert P. Marshall, an African-American librarian at the State Teachers College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and first published as a quarterly magazine, A Guide to Negro Periodical Literature, from 1941 to 1946. It was the first index to black serials ever compiled and covers 42 of the leading African-American periodicals between 1940 and 1946. The Marshall Index was published in a revised single-volume print edition by ProQuest in 2002, edited by James Danky and Richard Newman, and is now made available online through Black Studies Center.

The Chicago Defender

BSC provides the full text backfile, from 1910 to 1975, of the influential black newspaper The Chicago Defender. Robert Sengstacke Abbott founded the Defender in May 1905 and by the outbreak of the First World War it had become the most widely-read black newspaper in the country, with more than two thirds of its readership based outside Chicago. When Abbott died in 1940, his nephew John Sengstacke became editor and publisher of the Defender, which began publishing on a daily basis in 1956.

Black Literature Index

Black Studies Center includes the electronic index to the Black Literature microfiche collection. This index allows users to search over 70,000 bibliographic citations for fiction, poetry and literary reviews published in 110 black periodicals and newspapers between 1827-1940. For citations to content from the Chicago Defender for which full text is available in Black Studies Center, a link is included directly to the relevant article.

Additional Modules

ProQuest Dissertations for Black Studies

The ProQuest Dissertations for Black Studies module contains a thousand doctoral dissertations and Masters' theses examining a wide variety of topics and subject areas relating to Black Studies. Included are dissertations written between 1970 and 2004 at over 100 universities and colleges across the United States. These dissertations were selected for their relevance to Black Studies scholars from the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses database. ProQuest Dissertations for Black Studies is available as an optional add-on module for Black Studies Center.

ProQuest Black Newspapers

The ProQuest Black Newspapers module includes four additional historical Black newspapers:

New York Amsterdam News (1922-1993)
Pittsburgh Courier (1911-2002)
Los Angeles Sentinel (1934-2005)
Atlanta Daily World (1932-2003)

Records from Black Literature Index are directly linked to the full-text articles appearing in New York Amsterdam News and the Pittsburgh Courier. These additional newspapers greatly expand the breadth of primary source material in Black Studies Center. Important perspectives on local, regional, and international events throughout the twentieth century are now available from these influential Black publications.

Future releases of Black Studies Center will see the inclusion of even more content for teaching and research in Black Studies!