Spotlight on: Oxford African American Studies Center Database

The Paul G. Blazer Library has a wealth of online databases to aid you in your research. Today I would like to introduce you to just one of those databases in particular, though, and that gem is the Oxford African American Studies Center Database.

With a tag line that declares it to be "the online authority on the African American Experience", you would expect the database to easily distinguish itself from other online resources. You would expect it, and you would not be let down, because it truly delivers with both a unique perspective and some hard-to-get source material.

My favorite part of the database is the section dedicated to Primary Source Documents. These items vary from slave narratives to transcripts of speeches to abolitionist petitions - and everything in between! These little snippets from history help bring history alive. More than that, though, they help take students beyond the limited interpretation of history that their textbooks offer while providing them insight into the point of view of those who came before us.

Equally moving is the section dedicated to images of the African American Experience. With more than 2300 images to choose from, history becomes flesh; what was once just fact on paper is suddenly illustrated. For example, this illustration titled "Slave Wearing an Iron Muzzle" says more about the cruel and inhumane treatment of slaves than most words ever could:



It would be impossible for a student researching the African American Experience to not find something useful in this database.

Wordle

Today, Dantrea mentioned an article in the School Library Journal about Wordle. You, like myself, are probably wondering what wordle or a wordle is. Here is the description from the Wordle website:

"Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. "

You can paste a list of words into a box or post a URL of a blog or blog feed and it will generate a word cloud based upon the words used. For fun I decided to post the URL for the Blazer Library blog, and this is the result:



If you click on the image it will take you to the website to view the larger image. It can be used for brainstorming, research, classroom assignments, and various other things. You can arrange the letters in different ways and in different colors. So go ahead and try it, you know you want to!!