Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice

Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice, 1490-2007. AM . ISBN Contact publisher for pricing (based on Carnegie Classification and JISC); includes nominal hosting fee, payable every 5 years.

Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice, 1490-2007 joins a similar fee-based database released earlier this year--Cengage Gale's Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive (CH, Dec'09, 47-1792), which has a very similar scope and time frame. Also available is a patchwork of free archives offered by universities, museums, and other academic and cultural organizations providing access to thousands of digitized books, documents, records, and ephemera. For instance, Antislavery Literature (CH, Nov'09, 47-1277), from the English Department of Arizona State University, offers an extensive collection of free original and linked primary resources on the topic. The producers of Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice have selected materials based on 17 themes covering major areas of research; these include Education, Resistance and Revolts, and Slavery Today, Legacy of Slavery. The documents are an impressive mix of previously published materials, unique manuscripts, maps, and other items contemporary to the era. Documents are nicely arranged into browsable categories such as Thematic Areas and Geographical Region, each with subcategories; however, the lack of specificity within the subcategories can be frustrating. For instance, the subcategory Resistance and Revolts presents three screens of 130 results listed in alphabetical order by the first word in the description of each item and not by any further breakdown. Users may conduct a basic or advanced search to retrieve items, which somewhat compensates for this shortcoming. The database provides an extensive chronology, a bibliography, links to other electronic resources, and an image slideshow, along with 13 brief topical essays on slavery and abolition. The database is stable, but the interface is unremarkable and dated in appearance for a fee-based product. The document viewer is easy to use and navigate, and users conveniently may view an original digitized document or a transcription. Those who purchase the database may download documents as PDFs, although this feature is not available during database trials. Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice may be useful for libraries with extensive slavery collections.

Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-level undergraduates through faculty/researchers.

Reprinted with permission from CHOICE, copyright by the American Library Association.