Reference Reviews

Péter's Digital Reference Shelf

October 2007

Title: War & Terrorism Collection (W&TC)
Publisher: Gale
URL: http://www.terrorisminfo.mipt.org/Resources/WarAndTerrorism.asp
Cost: Free (registration required here)
Tested: September 21–27, 2007

The Context

There is a huge variety of digital sources about terrorism, and this topic has remained the leading item in magazines, radio and TV talk shows and news.

When you need real information about terrorism your best bet remains the respected set of newspapers and magazines, and not the audio and visual media where the protagonists in reporting and commenting on terrorism–related events are the ones whose flashiness are inversely proportional to their depth of knowledge and competence on the subject. The good old print sources are still selective in providing a forum for the competent ones (even when their opinion may differ from yours or mine).

All of the mega–databases from H.W. Wilson, Gale, UMI (now part of CSA) and EBSCO have hundreds of thousand good full text articles, reports and analyses of events, trends and developments related to terrorism but not every public library offers access to at least one of them, not even in the most developed countries.

The W&TC is focusing on magazines, newspapers, government reports dealing with issues of terrorism, and it is open access through the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism. Sign–up is required, but it is free. The only comparable digital collection is the International Security & Counter Terrorism Reference Center (ISCTRC) of EBSCO It is also available free of charge for registered users —again, through MIPT. It is not readily apparent on the MIPT Web site because it is not on the first screen, but after you registered at MIPT once, use this URL to get to the ISCTRC database. I will have a review later this year about it.

The Intelligence & Terrorism Information Center of Israel (ITICI) claims that its Web site is considered a leading site on terrorism. My impression is that from the perspective of the public the MIPT site is far more advanced and far more rich in content. This was particularly confirmed when I went to the library site of the ITICI, where among the overview and description of the facilities there is a single link —to the catalog. I would provide the URL here, but after several trials I got only this empty screen —quite a disappointment even if I did not have high expectations for a traditional –though Webified– catalog in this matter.

I bet that the widely acknowledged agents of Mossad don’t want to find a map on this Web site if terrorists would try to "pull an Entebbe" again.

The Content

Size and Composition

The database has more than 1.4 million records. My test showed slightly fewer records by document type, but the discrepancy me be caused by the fact that only the major document types are used to create clusters and show their size. The largest component is the subset for newspaper articles, which exceeds 1 million items. Magazine articles represent the second largest component with 281,347 items. There are records for more than 103,000 academic journal articles, and there are 2,406 items, (loosely referred to as books), which do include books and book chapters, but also various government agency reports, and the Congressional Research Services Reports. Indeed, some of the reports are very long, more than 25,000 words (about 50 pages). Then again, articles in law reviews are very often run much longer than that , and scholarly articles commonly are in the 30–50 page range, but we don’t refer to them as books.

Full text availability

Very importantly, all the records are full text records, except for the academic journal articles, where only 50% of the records have the full text of the document. This is because until recently, the largest academic publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley) have not been willing to make available digitally their papers through aggregators. This is now changing with the effective compromise that usually the issues of the most current 12 months are not available through aggregators, but prior years are. Beyond the mere availability of the full text documents the extra value is in their searchability which cannot be taken at face value by the digital presence of full text in some databases even in 2007.

Many records are available both in HTML and in PDF format (the best solution), but I could not test their ratio in this database.

Source base

The source base of the customized versions of InfoTrac is selected by the clients, in this case by MIPT. The presence of military, homeland security and defense journals is obviously very strong in this customized subset of InfoTrac. The sources include academic and professional journals and magazines, such as Airport Security Report, Countering Terrorism: Integration of Practice and Theory, Defense Transportation Journal, Joint Force Quarterly, Journal of Electronic Defense, Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin, Military Review, Military Thought, National Defense, Naval War College Review, Special Warfare along with news publications for military branch specializations, such as Marines, Army and Air Force.

It is no accident that there are several journals with a strong regional emphasis, such as Arab Studies Quarterly, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Israel Studies, Middle East Journal, Middle East Policy, Middle East Quarterly. There are also several more mainstream journals and magazines which cover war and terrorism issues well, such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Government Security, Harper’s Magazine, Harvard International Review, Mother Jones, Nation, National Review, Perspectives on Political Science, Political Science Quarterly and Spectrum. The most important general interest news magazines Newsweek, TIME, and U.S. News and World Reports are well covered, including regional editions of the former two.

Subject and time period coverage

It is obvious from any search that the database covers all the aspects of war and terrorism —subject–wise. Still, for some topics, even in such a mega–database, there are only relatively few documents, such as on the subject of wahhabism, the branch of Islam. It is surprising as wahhabism is so much behind the ideology and financing of terrorism. The descriptor search Wahhabi movement finds only 10 items, and even the keyword search wahhabism OR wahabism yield only 17 hits. However, the articles and reviews from academic journals and news magazines provide a good start, and substantial book reviews lead to (or deter from) books on the subject. Wahhabism appears in a couple of hundred articles but it is mentioned only in passing.

There is one major limitation of the database. It covers only the issues of contemporary war and terrorism, and this is not obvious, neither is the time–span mentioned in the database information sheet.

In turn, the result of the above casual test search prompted me to check the time span of the database, as I usually do, and it partially explained the disappointing result. More than 80% of the content consists of records for documents published in the past 10 years. It would make sense to beef up the pre–1997 segment to let us learn more from history.

Metadata elements

The metadata elements in the records are clearly identified, and well laid out. It is an excellent idea to move the descriptors to a sidebar (CSA does the same), label them as related subjects and show their occurrence in the database. This not only leads to articles about the most prominently associated people and/or country with a topic like political corruption with Tom Delay, but also help when the user can’t recall the name of a person but knows his/her most (in)famous behavioral pattern, like that of Jack Abramoff.

Inclusion of the bibliographic citation format is particularly welcome. It’s another question that the very long name of the organization which makes available this database is prematurely and oddly truncated in the bibliographic citations. This should be fixed, and can be done easily by abbreviating one more element in the organization’s name if there is indeed a limit for the length of this data element.

The Software

The software offers four modes of access, quite a rarity these days. The first one, called Subject Guided Search is particularly rare. It combines subject browsing with searching. It has been a trademark of the InfoTrac software, and worth keeping it, even if users tend to prefer to go for the jugular, and search directly. As I often tell to my students, this is like diving into a pool without checking if there is water, and enough water in it. The consequences are not equally lethal, but still may have serious consequences.

Searching for the term al–qaida as a keyword brings up merely eight articles from academic journals, and seven magazine articles. News sources yield 2,637 hits. The reason is that many newswires, including UPI use this spelling, and the newspapers which syndicate newswire stories (because they are good fillers but annoyingly repetitive and redundant in search results), also use this version of the term.

Although it is not cool to browse (unless you are a real information professional, aware of the implications of searching without browsing), and for the Google generation guided search may seem to be only for sissies (in the meaning defined by the American Heritage Dictionary), it is really useful. If you enter al–Qaida as a term in this mode, InfoTrac would tell you that the preferred form is Al–Qaeda and that there are 900 items with this spelling as a descriptor.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, because the query for al–Qaeda as a keyword yields 173 hits from academic journals, 857 from magazines, 56 from books and reports, and 1,171 from the redundant and for me least pertinent news sources (which use both formats, such as my local newspaper which uses different spelling in a syndicated and in another item even on the very same page). The difference between the appropriateness of the al–qaeda versus the al–qaida format (for the substantial source genres of academic journals and magazines) becomes obvious when you do a full text search. The safest bet —as usual— is to make a compromise and search in both name formats using a Boolean OR operator.

It is another unusual feature that the source list can be browsed not only by title but also by subject area, to get a feel about the variety of journals in the major disciplinary and sub–disciplinary segments of the database. Searching for most of the prominent terrorists with transliterated Arab names would be far less effective without the guided search because of the great inconsistency. Who is Osama bin Laden for one publication, is Osama bin Ladin for another, and Usama bin Laden for yet another to use only three variants. The software in the guided mode handles the simpler variants pretty well, but with the most problematic ones not even that can help. In the terrorism topic the one with the most variant is the president of Libya whose first name and last name combination variants exceed 100. Luckily, he can be searched by his official title to look up the preferred variant in the list of related terms in the sidebar.

The other three modes are the basic search, advanced search and command search options. There are filter boxes to limit the search to items with full text available, published in peer–reviewed publication and/or with illustration. It is more than icing on the cake that in the side–bar the refined document types are listed along with their frequency within the set. It allows the user to zoom in quickly, on cover stories. interviews, book reviews, etc. after the results are known —without prior commitment.

Limiting the search by Lexile range could be an excellent filter to customize the result list by the readability level of the document (to match the reading level of the user), but it begs for a link to a help file which explains what the ranges represent. It is not a problem if you don’t know the exact from and to values, because the software is smart enough to match the user–supplied number to a range (i.e. if you give 900, it will search for the Lexile range of 800–950 automatically. The problem is that —except for educators— most users would not have an idea about the Lexile scoring system, let alone about the range for, say, an average high–school graduate. The full text of the documents can be translated in a few seconds into one of the eight languages supported. They are far from perfect but the in light of the immediacy and the freebie nature, they are still impressive as they can give the gist of the article for someone whose English is not good enough for understanding the original.

Selected records can be printed and emailed, or directly exported to one of several bibliography management programs, such as RefWorks which can produce a bibliography in many formats which are different from the automatically created one that I praised above.

The War & Terrorism Collection from Gale is an excellent free resource (requiring only one–time registration) from the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, which stands out from the many government agencies that try to do it in different ways with their own arsenal, but not at the same quality and efficiency as this institute. I doubt that MIPT could prevent terrorism, but timely and good information could help in reducing the odds.