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This user-friendly Gale database contains primary sources from the 19th to 21st centuries that are sure to appeal to people interested in modern counterculture and social histories, along with progressive political and societal movements. 

This Gale database offers a distinctive look into the history of American environmental conservation.

HeinOnline’s revamped, improved, and expanded iteration of Congress and the Courts provides a broader contextual foundation to analyze judiciary systems and actions.

The United States Geological Survey’s topoView offers access to maps in a way that's educational and entertaining.

This database project offers free, comprehensive, unprecedented access to three decades of material about Asian Pacific American history, culture, politics, and news, all published in AsianWeek. 

Drawing from multiple disciplines, the Bloomsbury Food Library enables users to explore niche aspects of food history and their wider implications in historical and sociocultural contexts.

Gale Business: Plan Builder effectively helps budding entrepreneurs, experienced business owners, and nonprofits create realistic business plans and analyze their business concepts.

Gale Digital Scholar Lab empowers users to aggregate large sets of digital humanities archival data while taking tech setup out of the process.

ProQuest One Psychology is an invaluable tool that provides access to a comprehensive collection of multiformat materials centered on psychology and counseling curriculums.

Designed by and for higher-education teachers in Spain, Latin America, and the U.S., Platino Educa delivers access to hundreds of hard-to-find Spanish-language and Portuguese-language films.

The documents and visual materials in this compilation detail the companies, events, and pioneers crucial to the 20th-century growth of the mass media and communications industry in the U.S.

Hiveclass gives time-strapped programming librarians guides and suggestions for creating active programs for all ages.

With its sophisticated search capabilities, support for primary-source literacy, and singular collections of primary-source material, this resource is a must-have for libraries supporting historical and political research of far-left political movements.

This first-rate resource is for anyone who wants to know more about the history, development, and evolution of educational policy, practice, and theory over the last century. Teachers, educational administrators, and policymakers will also benefit. 

AM’s database Africa and the New Imperialism covers the history of European colonial expansion in Africa during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s a valuable addition for institutions seeking to expand their collection of primary source offerings on African history and European colonialism during this time period. 

AM’s most recent archive is the first in a planned two-module collection that highlights the political, social, and cultural upheaval in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

Revolution and Protest Online provides access to excellent primary resources, but there is room for improvement in terms of usability and accessibility.

The first installment in Gale’s four-part State Papers Online Colonial series offers researchers unprecedented access to primary-source documents that reflect Britain’s complex history of trade and governance in East and Southeast Asia.

ProQuest’s Ethnographic Sound Archives Online database contains more than 6,000 audio recordings that are ideal for libraries wanting to offer a vast collection of world music, oral storytelling, and ambient sound. Ethnomusicologists can utilize these materials in their college-level courses. 

Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics offers students and researchers an engaging entry into robust scholarship and innovative thinking in contemporary aesthetics. This user-friendly resource should have a place in academic libraries.

The Bloomsbury Drama Online database now has an additional 270 films that will benefit instructors looking to teach and engage students in stage performances and productions. 

Public and technical libraries will want to add this comprehensive resource with an intuitive and streamlined platform. It’s a one-stop shop on everything to do with vehicles, making it a sound investment.

ProQuest’s LGBT Magazine Archive is ideal for researchers studying LGBTQIA+ history, for it contains well-established and hard-to-find content from significant LGBTQIA+ magazines published in the U.S. and the UK from the mid-20th through the 21st centuries. 

The Rolling Stone Archive is for lovers of popular music, personalities, and cultural newsmakers of the last 50 years. There's also something for researchers of non-music content that relates to history, politics, and social conditions. 

SAGE Skills: Student Success is an excellent resource for institutions supporting undergraduate education and returning or nontraditional students looking to refresh their skills.

This is an excellent collection on the impact and aftermath of World War II on British society, businesses, and domestic life. 

This in-depth examination of the history, politics, economics, and social movements in Eastern Europe after World War II through the Cold War is an excellent resource for users interested in the post-Stalin era.

Bloomsbury Video Library’s newly launched streaming-video platform hosts more than 2,000 film titles, which makes it a strong new contender for academic libraries’ streaming-video budgets.

LJ’s top 10 picks for Best Reference Databases 2022 range in scope from architecture to history to women trailblazers. 

The Globe to Globe Festival collection is sure to inspire scholars, performers, and students of Shakespeare, as well as anyone who values or teaches intercultural theater. Recommended for any schools with drama programs or courses on Shakespeare.

Secret Files from World Wars to Cold War is an excellent compilation of primary documents. The collection of 12,000 documents explores British government secret intelligence files on four key 20th-century conflicts: the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the early years of the Cold War, and the Korean War.

The American Kennel Club (AKC) Library and Archives is a unique new resource, sure to delight dog-fanciers and researchers alike.

Noteworthy for its specialized content and usability, this is one of four collections of primary documents from Coherent Digital hosted on the History Commons platform. It covers the period from the armistice of 1918 to the outbreak of World War II. 

This user-friendly resource, a collaboration between Adam Matthew Digital and Sage Research Methods, is designed to introduce undergraduate students to research methodologies and primary sources. Although aimed primarily at undergraduate students, graduate students new to their field or needing a refresher will also find it useful. Overall, this is a solid choice for institutions supporting undergraduate research in the arts and humanities.

This second installment in Gale’s “Making of Modern Law” series chronicles additions of the 11 United States appellate courts from 1891 until 1950. The database comprises nearly two million pages of briefs, appendixes, memoranda, petitions, statements, transcripts, and more. A recommended addition to libraries already subscribing to the “Making of Modern Law” series, this is a key resource not only for legal researchers but also for anyone interested in the economic, political, and social issues of the 1900s.

From family and food to memory and sexuality, Bloomsbury Cultural History covers an expansive list of themes throughout various periods of recorded history. Its versatility and accessibility appeal to a wide audience, making it especially useful to institutions that support the humanities. 

Gale Case Studies complies a number of case studies in each of the three modules which encompass multidisciplinary subjects. The topics covered (LGBTQ+ issues, political extremism, and public health) intersect with a wide variety of studies. Straightforward with helpful functions to create citations and facilitate discussions, this resource is ideal for undergraduates, although it could appeal to the general researcher as well.

Comics Plus is an excellent resource to build and expand both sequential art collections and public awareness of the format’s diversity and appeal. The content is broad, deep, rich, and nuanced and offers high-interest options for dedicated and novice comics readers alike. Supporting resources, including the featured lists and category tags, provide support for library staff and an opportunity to increase community access to the format. The LibraryPass platform works almost intuitively and has been designed with clear library utility awareness.

Designed for graduate and undergraduate students, SAGE Campus is an online learning platform that offers nearly 30 self-paced courses covering the fundamentals of data literacy, social science research methods, data science, and publication. Courses include interactive text and video content, lectures, quizzes, and practical exercises.

A still-growing collection of 17th-, 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century philosophy texts, plus a 6,500-entry Encyclopedia of Philosophers. It’s a viable resource for students, teachers, and researchers of philosophy, particularly Western philosophy, thanks to its easy navigation, multiple ways to access content, and numerous search features.

Ingram’s iCurate inClusive is a collection development tool and service that provides a diversity assessment snapshot of a library’s adult, teen, and children’s collections and offers recommendations for immediately filling gaps, while eliminating the time-consuming and laborious process of a manual diversity assessment. It includes a regularly updated proprietary database identifying new titles that reflect the diversity of human experience.

The fourth installment of Gale’s Archives of Sexuality and Gender highlights primary source materials from and about underrepresented LGBTQ+ groups, with an emphasis on regions such as southern Africa and Australia. The collection offers valuable insight on the struggle for equal rights, explorations of sexuality, and important figures and organizations in LGBTQ+ history.

A database of more than 3,650 business case studies that reflect the depth, diversity, and global nature of the modern business world. An excellent resource for academic libraries that serve business departments; cases are easily discoverable and offer enhancements like teaching notes and discussion questions.

This resource from Gale features 500,000 pages of previously classified information on the intelligence services of Britain and the British Empire from 1905 to 2002. The archive provides perspectives on British espionage, global polices and strategies, international relations, international politics, and secret operations prior to World War I through the dismantling of the British Empire and creation of a new world order in the late 20th century.

Adam Matthew Digital’s Mass Observation Archive collects surveys and directives issued by the Mass Observation Project from the 1980s to the 2000s that documented Britons’ opinions on current events, political movements, and everyday experiences. The Mass Observation Project is particular to the UK, but many of its themes have historical significance that makes them relevant to researchers of other regions. The collection is well organized and easy to use; a valuable addition for institutions.

PressReader is a wonderful way to read the news. Simply and gracefully designed, it enables readers to search, browse, and page through interactive digital editions of thousands of newspapers and magazines from all over the world. With its limited date coverage and searchability, PressReader likely won’t appeal to researchers, but casual readers, language learners, travelers, businesspeople, and international students wishing to stay in touch with home will relish the global content and reading experience.

This outstanding one-stop business gateway enables users to find books, company reports, journals, videos, conference proceedings, and much more. Featuring an abundance of content, the database is intuitive, with a combination of no-frills features and options.

Building on Module I, this installment explores the lives and history of individuals from the LGBTQIA+ community, bringing the collection into the present. Featuring a clean, simple interface, this collection will meet the needs of newcomers to the field of research on sexuality, as well as experienced scholars.

Bloomsbury Fashion Business Cases establishes a link between education and business aspects of the fashion industry. A strong resource for business, marketing, and industry-related studies.

Social Explorer enables users to create maps, reports, and presentations from a wide range of national and international survey data.  An excellent resource, with customization tools that make data easy to create, and excellent visualization options for interpreting and presenting data.

Language-learning app Bluebird aims to bring language instruction to everyone, regardless of mother tongue. Affordable, responsive, easy to set up, and simple to access, Bluebird is an excellent resource with an enormous amount of content.

Mindscape Commons provides interactive virtual reality mental health content for students learning clinical skills and empathy in fields like counseling, psychology, and social work. It exhibits normal growing pains as a new product, but it’s an intriguing resource with potential to shake up the library streaming media market.

Providing authoritative information on physical activity and sports, the Human Kinetics Library consists of 150 ebooks, as well as 200 videos of demonstrations of exercise movements, drills, and key physical activity concepts. Boasting easy navigation, multiple content links, an engaging interface, and numerous search features, this is an excellent resource for anyone with an interest in exercise science, fitness, health, nutrition, and sports.

Part of the growing Bloomsbury Fashion collection, the Bloomsbury Fashion Video Archive features more than 3,000 videos from the YOOX–NET-A-PORTER Runway Archive Collections. This selection is ideal for academic and professional institutions that support studies relevant to fashion (history, industry, and design) and the arts.

EBSCO’s Hispanic American Periodicals Index provides access to more than 335,000 citations, 170,000 links to full-text journals, and 700-plus journals, in Spanish, English, and Portuguese, dating back to the late 1960s. With regional publications in multiple languages, it stands out as a valuable resource for Latin American and Caribbean studies, as well as international politics, cultural and area studies, and multidisciplinary studies.

This database clearly and powerfully chronicles the factors that gave rise to migration and resettlement, the logistics of the migrations and resettlements, and the political challenges faced by refugee populations, relief agencies, and national governments. It will be indispensable for migration and World War II scholars and students.

Screen Studies offers a range of works, from award-winning screenplays, to critical and practical works on film and filmmaking. A valuable resource for institutions that support cinema and film studies, screenwriting, and filmmaking.

LJ's best databases of the year are a wide assortment, from a one-stop shop for fashion students to archives of sex and sexuality.

Academic Video Online has been a popular choice in libraries for many years, and with good reason. Its catalog is large and diverse, with strengths in many different subject areas. Overall, this is an excellent resource for libraries serving educational organizations at any level.

From more intuitive searching to digital circulation of formerly print-only reference materials and to more materials on marginalized populations, trends in reference reflect library users’ changing needs and expectations.

Bloomsbury Fashion Central more than meets its promise to serve as the central source for interdisciplinary research on fashion and dress. The breadth of peer-reviewed and original content sets it apart, making it valuable for those interested in the history of fashion, industry, culture, and more.

This unique, extremely user-friendly collection of historical sources is highly recommended. Wiley’s dedication to the user experience, as demonstrated through promises of expanding the breadth of digitized materials from additional partnerships, improved features and search capabilities, and prominent invitations for feedback, make it an exciting platform to comb through, as well as one to keep an eye on as it expands and adapts to user needs.

Librarians eager to steer patrons toward library collections will appreciate the opportunities for collaboration this tool provides; although the Grant Papers are available in their original form online at the Library of Congress, the quality and readability of this work’s text and its user-friendliness make it an excellent alternative

A roundup of excellent subscription databases reviewed by LJ in 2018.