eReviews

CQ Pr. wwwcqpress.com

These two separate files from CQ Press are remarkably easy to use, especially for electronic scholarly books. The Contemporary Middle East: A Documentary History Online Edition (CME) is the electronic version of the 1320-page print volume (2007) edited by John Felton (a longtime foreign affairs reporter for Congressional Quarterly, Inc., and National Public Radio). It offers full-text and excerpted primary-source documents focusing on key events that have occurred in and influenced the Middle East since World War I.

The Political History of America's Wars (PHAW) combines biographies, essays, and primary-source documents to depict the causes, events, and consequences of U.S. wars, beginning with the Revolutionary War and continuing up to Operation Iraqi Freedom (covering about 50 conflicts). This file includes a glossary and a table of laws and treaties.

HOW DO THEY WORK? The opening screen of CME gives you a simple search box and a link to Advanced Search at screen top, as well as omnipresent Home, About, Help, and Log Out links. Below these is a section that lets you browse the eight chapters in the book: "Foundations of the Contemporary Middle East," "Arabs and Israelis," "Israel and the Palestinians," "Lebanon and Syria," "Iran," "Iraq and the Gulf Wars," "Afghanistan," and "Turkey." Below that is a static map of the region.

At screen left are links to Your Profile, Favorite Documents, Saved Searches, Document History, How To Cite, Contents Browse, Maps, Chronology, Bibliography, Index, and About the Author. By creating Your Profile, you can save Favorite Documents, Searches, and a Document History—the rest of these links are pretty self-explanatory.

PHAW also gives you a simple search box and link to Advanced Search on its opening screen, along with the omnipresent links described above. However, below these are two Browse sections: Browse by Topic (e.g., the Colonial Era and Early America; Indian Wars) and Browse Table of Contents (48 sections ranging from the American Revolution to the Franco-American Quasi-War, Early Indian Wars of California, the Snake War and Sheridan's Campaign, the Moro Wars, the Nicaraguan Civil War of 1925–1933, and on to Operation Iraqi Freedom).

At screen left are Your Profile, Favorite Documents, Saved Searches, Document History, How To Cite, About the Author, and Contents Browse, including Topics Browse, Biographies, Conflict Timelines, Historic Documents, Images, and Index.

CAN YOU USE THEM? In a word, yes. The browsable outlines supply sufficient information for you to browse quickly and sensibly, and the searching is fast and easy, too. My search of CME for "taliban" found 11 results, arranged in descending order by the frequency of hits within the book sections (ranging from "U.S. Invasion of Afghanistan" to "U.S. Iranian Relations"). The Chronology, though static, is detailed and very helpful. One suggestion: Any chance of making this interactively dynamic, linking to the most relevant section of the text?

It's easy to Save, Email, Print, and Cite the fairly simple maps, but it was not intuitively obvious how to return to my previous page once I pulled up a map (the Back key on my browser disappeared; to go back you have to hit Close in a fairly remote part of the screen top).

The Bibliography for CME is up-to-date, and the Index is adequately detailed although relatively static (cross-references are hyperlinked). I couldn't find a direct link to primary sources, although when I did a search on "primary source," I found 77, including a Letter from Yasir Arafat to Yitzhak Rabin (September 9, 1993) and an Executive Summary of the Duelfer Report on the Search for Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (October 6, 2004).

The Help facility didn't give me any clues on how to narrow my search to primary sources, and I wish it would.

Having looked in vain for a separate link to primary sources in CME, in PHAW I immediately clicked the link for Historic Documents and found about 175 primary sources, including text from "An Act in Relation to Marriage Between White Men and Indian Women, 1888," Colin Powell's "Case for the Existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction, 2003," the Emancipation Proclamation, the Lend-Lease Act of 1941, both of Abraham Lincoln's inaugural addresses, Gen. Douglas MacArthur's farewell address to Congress, and the Zimmermann Telegram of 1917 (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_telegram for an explanation and the text again; I confess I'd never heard of this before).

Searching here, too, was simple and effective; my search for "kent state" brought up the chapter on the Vietnam war, with multiple references to the Kent State Massacre, as well as the Chronology of the Vietnam War, which placed the massacre in the time line of the war.

WHAT'S THE COST? The one-time perpetual access price for CME is $700, $350 for PHAW. Consortial discounts are available, although there is a charge for additional campuses or branches, as applicable. There is a small annual hosting fee per file, but that fee is discounted for multiple products, and a cap is in place on the fee for libraries with multiple online products from CQ Press.

A note about perpetual access from the CQ Press web site: "Perpetual access means that your library owns access to each title; as future editions are published, your library has the option to purchase access to the new edition, but you will not lose access to the content for which you had previously purchased access."

HOW GOOD ARE THEY? In terms of both scholarship and accessibility (especially in comparison with, say, Gale Cengage's Encyclopaedia Judaica and Brill's Encyclopaedia of Islam), both of the affordable files get a ten. Although not perfect, they are well on their way to getting there.

BOTTOM LINE I like what I see here, and I hope that CQ Press continues to go in this direction with all its electronic reference books. Both files are highly recommended for academic, public, and school libraries.