Chester Fritz Library Updates

News and notes from UND's Chester Fritz Library

Humanities Electronic Resource Collections

This past year, Chester Fritz Library has been able to add a number of digital collections, with primary sources and scholarly literature, supporting research and courses in the humanities. 

Our biggest addition for scholarly books is from Project MUSE, which added thousands of titles in history, literature, anthropology, and other areas of the humanities and social sciences. They represent dozens of academic publishers and are especially strong in scholarship from the past few years. We’ve used Project MUSE for journals and other resources for several years now, and we’re thrilled to be able to expand our holdings with this well-known and respected source. 

More specialized eBook collection purchases include Bloom’s Literary Criticism, the complete collection of handbooks on literature authored by Harold Bloom, a leading American literary critic and Yale Professor of Humanities. The newly acquired Literary Encyclopedia offers scholarship by university researchers of English, American, German, Russian, Italian, French and Classical literatures, as well as robust coverage of Hispanic, Japanese, Canadian, East European, and various postcolonial literatures.  

In addition, ARTFL is a joint project of the French Government and the University of Chicago to provide a digital scholarship platform and tools for a wide variety of genres and topics, including several French dictionaries. The most significant database is ARTFL-FRANTEXT, which consists of more than 3,500 French language texts from the 12th through the 20th centuries. The platform includes other smaller databases, as well as making some free databases publicly accessible on its platform. Lastly, New Play Exchange offers a substantial digital library of scripts by contemporary playwrights and is searchable by a variety of themes, characters, demographics, etc. 

Finally, we have five great new collections of primary historical sources: 

  1. The African American Historical Serials Collection is a database of over 170 periodicals, reports, and other documents of African American religious life from the 1820s to 1922. 
  2. Civil War Primary Source Documents contains a wide range of historical source types, from letters and diaries to official reports to bureaucratic forms, all of which can provide insight for life in the ranks and the home front during the Civil War. 
  3. Disability in the Modern World is a film series which documents the experiences of those with disabilities, in the current day and in the past, examining the way that “disability” is understood and as the disabled understand themselves. 
  4. North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories collects material from and about immigrant communities in the United States and Canada–including North Dakota.  Over 100,000 pages of oral histories, letters, memoirs and more offer a rich trove of research opportunities. 
  5. North American Indian Thought and Culture has more than 100,000 pages of newspapers, memoirs, audio files, photographs, and more produced by Native Americans and First Nations peoples in the United States and Canada.

The humanities are based on the study of texts, so we are thrilled to be able to offer these new collections of primary and scholarly text sources for our patron community. 

For more information on any of these or our other resources please contact your subject librarian.