Popular Culture in Britain and America - Highly Recommended

The following review appeared in Choice in June 2012 (ref 49-5439):

49-5439

Reference \ Social & Behavioral Sciences

Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975 [formerly Rock and Roll, Counterculture, Peace and Protest].

Adam Matthew Education.

Please contact publisher for pricing. Internet Resource.

Reviewed in 2012jun CHOICE.

http://www.amedu.com/

The content of this online collection of original archival material extends well beyond rock and roll, documenting youth culture, counterculture, and cultural change with pamphlets, letters, government files, fanzines, underground magazines, photos, album covers, and other texts and images. Even the date range of the collection exceeds the title's claim; some of the content (mainly ephemera) extends into the 1990s, e.g., searchers may come across the program for the 1992 Chicago Comicon. Some features have a noticeably British point of view, but the content is well chosen to represent the era in both the United States and the UK. Material is drawn from such institutions as the Browne Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University; the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley; and the National Archives at Kew. This collection offers easily discoverable documents to students new to the use of primary sources; furthermore, its abundance of well-chosen content should prove valuable to more experienced researchers.

The database structure and interface follow the patterns used in other Adam Matthew Education products such as Victorian Popular Culture (CH, Mar'09, 46-3599) and Everyday Life and Women in America (CH, Oct'08, 46-0654). Features include selected video from ITN Source and the Huntley Film Archive; other visual materials arranged in thematic collections and slideshows; a chronology with 2,500-plus entries and a visualization tool that gives an overview of a topic in a given year; a dictionary of relevant terms; useful external web links; four topic-specific essays that give context to the collection; and separate search features for accessing the Documents, Video, Visual Resources, and any or all of the other products from Adam Matthew Education (via Archive Explorer). (Full text access is, of course, limited to those collections to which a library subscribes.)

All the search tools are useful, and the advanced search for documents offers a number of options and restrictors for precise full-text searching. The choice of multiple search screens, however, could be confusing to new users; help screens list the major features, but provide little guidance on how to use them. Similarly, document views are appealing and highlight search terms, but are not entirely intuitive. The site provides a number of additional tools for working with its content. Users may register to save searches with a My Archive feature or save images and generate slideshows in My Lightbox. Citations are exportable to RefWorks and Endnote (CH, Feb'08, 45-2929), and static URLs and social networking buttons provide for easy linking to specific documents. The interface, much like the content of this collection, shows considerable thought regarding the needs of both researchers and instructors.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-level undergraduates through faculty/researchers. -- W. L. Svitavsky, Rollins College