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Welcome

Black Studies Center is migrating to the ProQuest Platform!

ProQuest is pleased to inform you that Black Studies Center is now live on the ProQuest Platform! (NOTE: the product is in dual access, so it is live on both the Chadwyck-Healey legacy instance and on the ProQuest Platform). With its clean interface and responsive design, the ProQuest platform delivers a modern research experience that guides users’ discovery, access and management of rich, diverse content sources. As a result, Black Studies Center will be more discoverable as users will be able to cross-search its content along with scholarly journals, news, historical documents and other relevant sources.

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Dual access started on April 14, 2021 and is expected to last through the end of August 2021! The new url for the ProQuest Platform instance is https://www.proquest.com/bsc.

New: Watch the recorded webinar from May 11, 2021 on Black Studies Center now on the ProQuest Platform.

May 2021 Updates

Black Abolitionist Papers is also migrating from the Chadwyck-Healey legacy instance to the ProQuest platform, and dual access will start on May 15, 2021.

This primary source collection details the extensive work of African Americans to abolish slavery in the United States prior to the Civil War. Covering the period 1830-1865, the collection presents the international impact of African American activism against slavery, in the writings of the activists themselves. The approximately 15,000 articles, documents, correspondence, proceedings, manuscripts, and literary works of almost 300 Black abolitionists show the full range of their activities in the United States, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, France and Germany. Black Abolitionist Papers represents a huge effort by a scholarly team, headed by C. Peter Ripley and George E. Carter, who recognized that African Americans were a pivotal and persuasive force in the 19th-century anti-slavery movement. Access this collection here: https://www.proquest.com/bap.

In addition, the International Index to Black Periodicals has changed its name to Black Studies Periodicals. This is a major periodical database on Black Studies and culture. Coverage is international in scope and multidisciplinary, spanning cultural, economic, historical, religious, social and political issues, and has the largest backfile of retrospective bibliographic citations for Black Studies periodicals from as early as 1902. Access this collection here: https://www.proquest.com/bpd.

March 2021 Updates

Below are some screenshots to help start to become familiar with the new Black Studies Center on the ProQuest Platform.

Homepage view

From the home page, researchers can browse journal titles or the Schomburg Essays. They can also navigate to the Historical Newspapers or to videos and images or the timeline.

Results page

The results page will show segmented research results, by content type. The top three results in each will be displayed, with the ability to view all results in each content type.

Browsing the Schomburg Essays

 

This is a view of a portion of a Schomburg Essay. Readers can navigate the essay via the table of contents on the left side of the screen. Easy essay ends with a list of recommended readings.

Timeline Views

Videos and Images

Key Benefits

• Newly-enhanced ProQuest platform. The modernized interface will consider the devices users are accessing the platform with, and the display will match the device (large monitors, standard desktops, laptops, tablets and smart phones). In addition, the ProQuest platform is continually designed and developed to meet Level AA of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) and Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act for features and functions. In 2020, the ProQuest platform received the ASPIRE 100% Gold Award for accessibility.
  • Modern research experience, guiding discovery, access and management of content sources. In addition to an overall modern research experience, researchers will be able to use multi-faceted results filtering, browse lists of content and download PDFs faster, and use enhanced post-processing tasks, such as citing, saving and sharing materials into workflow tools.
  • Other benefits of the new platform include an interface available in 20 different languages; article full text machine-translation support for 20 languages; text-to-speech functionality – save an HTML full text article as MP3 file; a broad range of customization options for the library regarding search behavior, sorting, and results display; personalization and personal space, using My Research accounts; more standard features such as auto-complete; and extensive usage reporting options.
  • The browsing experience has also been improved, allowing users to click to meaningful articles, essays, and results in fewer mouse-clicks than on the current site.
  • Librarians have more advanced branding options, ability to create widgets, create custom links.
  • Authentication: Adds Shibboleth, OpenAthens, Clever.com and barcode access.
  • Open access content from other collections available in full.
  • Learning tool (LTI/LMS) integration.
  • Timely updates to discovery services without dependence on manual processes on the legacy side.
  • Automated weekly updates to journal title lists.
  • ProQuest Platform recommender leverages user community engagement, among other factors, to build document relationships.
• Black Studies Center content is cross-searchable with content in any other product in the user’s subscription on the ProQuest Platform.
• Black Studies Center moves to a platform that is already accessible, responsive to different devices and COUNTER 5 compliant.
• From this point forward, Black Studies Center benefits from new features as they are added to ProQuest platform.
• Black Studies Center moves to an interface most institutions are already familiar with: Librarians no longer have to train or create materials for a Black Studies Center-only interface.

Content Details

The main content sets of the Black Studies Center on the ProQuest Platform will operate in the same way as the current site, but with the improvements noted above. Below is a description of the content sets in Black Studies Center:

• International Index to Black Periodicals - Black Studies Center users will continue to be able to search the International Index to Black Periodicals from within Black Studies Center. International Index to Black Periodicals covers journals and magazines from the United States, African nations, and the Caribbean. Coverage is international in scope and multidisciplinary, spanning cultural, economic, historical, religious, social, and political issues of vital importance to the Black Studies discipline. For institutions that currently subscribe separately to International Index to Black Periodicals, a separate International Index to Black Periodicals product is also created on the ProQuest platform.
• Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience - as with International Index to Black Periodicals, Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience will continue to be available as one of the key content sets within Black Studies Center. The 31 essays provide concise overviews as well as recommended readings on topics such as origins, culture, identity, art, religion, and social justice.
• All customers will also get the Black Literature Index in the new version of Black Studies Center. Begun at Yale University by Professor John Blassingame and continued by another colleague, Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the project was completed by Gates at Harvard's W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research. Since its release, the collection has redefined African American literature. Gates described it as rediscovering "a hermetically sealed library of the Afro-American periodical literature after a century of neglect." This index allows users to search over 70,000 bibliographic citations for fiction, poetry and literary reviews published in 110 black periodicals and newspapers between 1827-1940.
• Chicago Defender Newspaper – Black Studies Center provides the historical full-text of one of the most influential black newspapers in the United States, The Chicago Defender. Coverage is from 1910 to 1975. Robert Sengstacke Abbott founded The Defender in May 1905, and by the outbreak of the First World War, it had become the most widely-read black newspaper in the country, with more than two thirds of its readership based outside Chicago. When Abbott died in 1940, his nephew John Sengstacke became editor and publisher of The Defender, which began publishing on a daily basis in 1956. The first full-text issue presented here is from January 1, 1910.
• The Black Abolitionist Papers will also be migrating to the ProQuest Platform in May 2021. This primary source collection details the extensive work of African Americans to abolish slavery in the United States prior to the Civil War. Covering the period 1830-1865, the collection presents the international impact of African American activism against slavery, in the writings of the activists themselves. The approximately 15,000 articles, documents, correspondence, proceedings, manuscripts, and literary works of almost 300 Black abolitionists show the full range of their activities in the United States, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, France and Germany. Black Abolitionist Papers represents a huge effort by a scholarly team, headed by C. Peter Ripley and George E. Carter, who recognized that African Americans were a pivotal and persuasive force in the 19th-century anti-slavery movement.
  Black Abolitionist Papers is available as a separate purchase. The Black Abolitionist Papers will be migrating to the ProQuest Platform in May 2021. Institutions that have access to the Black Abolitionist Papers and Black Studies Center will be able to search this collection from its own interface as well as from within Black Studies Center.
• Institutions that also have access to any of our ProQuest Historical Black Newspapers will be able to search these newspapers from within Black Studies Center.

What To Expect

• When dual access starts in April 2021, you will have until the end of August 2021 to acclimate yourself to Black Studies Center in its new environment! We encourage you to create new bookmarks, update your A-Z list and download new MARC records. You may also want to update your discovery tools to point your users to the new collection. In September 2021, we will decommission the Black Studies Center legacy platform and redirects will point remaining users of the legacy site to the new version of the product on the ProQuest platform.
• During the dual access period, usage statistics of the legacy Black Studies Center site will still be available from the Administration Resources area of the legacy site (https://bsc.chadwyck.com). Once you begin to use the new Black Studies Center on the ProQuest platform, usage statistics pertaining to this new version of the product will be available via the ProQuest Administrator Module (PAM).
• Frequently Asked Questions:
  • Will there be new Black Studies Center MARC records for PQIS to download?
    New MARC records will be available for download from the ProQuest Administrator Module (PAM). If you have already signed up for monthly MARC records delivery you will automatically receive the MARC records for all the full text journals with the rest of your ProQuest Platform MARC records.
  • What will happen if we do nothing, if we don’t update the existing Black Studies Center MARC records?
    Once the dual access period comes to an end, redirects will resolve any legacy site bookmarked pages to the new platform version of Black Studies Center. Even if catalog records are not updated, the links they contain to the legacy Black Studies Center site will be automatically redirected to the relevant Black Studies Center records in the new version on the ProQuest platform.
  • What would be the advantage of updating records when they are available?
    The advantage of updating the records early is that an institution can choose to point patrons to the new ProQuest Platform version of Black Studies Center immediately, rather than waiting for redirects to kick in at the end of the dual access period.
  • Can we have a sample MARC record for the new Black Studies Center on the ProQuest platform?
    Yes, but only AFTER the migrated version of Black Studies Center has actually gone live.
  • Where can I get title lists for Black Studies Center?
    Title lists will be available from the product landing page within the Platform and from the ProQuest Administrator Module (PAM).
  • What will happen at the end of the dual access period?
    At the end of the dual access period all document-level durable URLs contained in existing Black Studies Center MARC records will be automatically redirected to the new, migrated version of Black Studies Center on the ProQuest platform.
  • What will happen to Black Studies Center bookmarks?
    There will be an automatic redirect at the end of the dual access period for any durable URLs to Black Studies Center documents that users may have saved / bookmarked through using the Black Studies Center product.
• Discovery services - During the dual-access period both Ex Libris PRIMO and SUMMON will feature the 2 versions of the Black Studies Center collection: the legacy collection and the ProQuest version. We recommend that you deactivate the legacy collection and activate the new version as soon as possible after the launch of the new product. At the end of the dual access period, the legacy Black Studies Center collection will be disabled and customers will have to select the new version of Black Studies Center in their discovery tools.
• All Black Studies Center trials will be on the ProQuest Platform only, once dual access begins.

Resources

• Black Studies Center Brochure (prior to new ProQuest platform version)
• Black Studies Center Libguide (Legacy)
• Black Studies Center Recorded Webinar

Global Support

ProQuest offers best-in-class customer service and technical support, so you can hit the ground running.

If the above information does not answer your questions feel free to contact us and we will be happy to assist.