Highlighted Databases: Universal Human Rights

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948. Among the chief architects were Dr. Charles Malik (Lebanon), Alexandre Bogomolov (USSR), Dr. Peng-chun Chang (China), René Cassin (France), Eleanor Roosevelt (US), Charles Dukes (United Kingdom), William Hodgson (Australia), Hernan Santa Cruz (Chile), and John P. Humphrey (Canada). This agreement articulates fundamental rights and freedoms for all persons, including the right to life, liberty, free speech and privacy, social security, health, and education.

In December we draw attention  development of legally binding international human rights treaties and human rights worldwide, as well as important initiatives on the Teachers College campus that include, The Urgency of Seeding Dignity: Honoring 20 Years of Global Collaboration for Transforming Suffering Through Courageous and Compassionate Action, he 20th Annual Workshop on Transforming Humiliation and Violent Conflict, hosted by The Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (MD-ICCCR) and the 39th Annual HumanDHS Conference. 

The following research resources are among many that inform the topic of universal human rights. 

Academic Search Premier is a multidisciplinary database providing full text for more than 4,600 journals, including nearly 3,900 peer-reviewed titles. PDF backfiles to 1975 or further are available for well over one hundred journals. See also Academic Search Complete, a scholarly, multidisciplinary full-text database, with more than 8,500 full-text periodicals, including more than 7,300 peer-reviewed journals. The database features PDF content going back as far as 1887.

Archives of Sexuality and Gender is a collection of primary sources facilitates scholarly research in the area of LGBTQ history and activism, cultural studies, psychology, sociology, health, political science, policy studies, human rights, gender studies, and more. Fully-searchable, this database is currently composed of five sub-collections. 

ERIC is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education to provide extensive access to educational-related periodical literature, ERIC (the Educational Resources Information Center) provides coverage of conferences, meetings, government documents, theses, dissertations, reports, audiovisual media, bibliographies, directories, books, and monographs. ERIC is accessible via the U.S. government ERIC site, through Ebsco ERIC, and via ProQuest ERIC. See "civil rights" as a subject heading.

Human Rights Documents Online is a full text searchable online version of the Human Rights Documents Project in microform published by Human Rights Internet ; [Leiden], The Netherlands : Brill/IDC, 2007-.

Human Rights Studies Online is a searchable database of documentation, analysis, and interpretation of major human rights violations and atrocity crimes worldwide available through Alexander Street Press. The collection takes a case study approach, providing primary and secondary materials for each selected event, including Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Darfur, and more than 30 additional subjects. This database provides access to books, primary documents, audio, maps, images, and video and spans 1900-2010.

International Bibliography of the Social Sciences is a valuable online resource for social science and interdisciplinary research. IBSS includes over two million bibliographic references to journal articles and to books, reviews and selected chapters dating back to 1951, providing broad coverage of international material and incorporating over 100 languages and countries.

International Political Science Abstracts indexes and abstracts articles in the field of political science (including the sub-fields of public administration, political theory, and international relations) published in journals and yearbooks published worldwide.

OECD iLibrary is the the online publications portal of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It includes all OECD books, papers, reports, periodicals, and statistical databases. Coverage: 1998 to the present. Subjects include: economics, business, social sciences, development, statistics, environment, education, agriculture, investment, finance, and governance.

PAIS (Public Affairs Information Service) International contains citations to journal articles, books, government documents, statistical directories, "gray literature," research reports, conference reports, publications of international agencies, and Internet resources pertaining to public affairs and public policy issues, with coverage from 1915 to present. Also available through the new ProQuest interface.

ProQuest provides broad multidisciplinary coverage of scholarly journals, newspapers, dissertations, and other types of publications; for international coverage and access to full texts of dissertations only, search Digital Dissertations, a subset of ProQuest.

SocINDEX with Full Text offers comprehensive coverage of sociology, encompassing all sub-disciplines and closely related areas of study. The database contains full text for more than 860 journals dating back to 1908, more than 830 books and monographs, and over 16,800 conference papers.

Sociological Abstracts covers the international literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences, covering such major areas as culture and social structure, family and social welfare, history and theory of sociology, radical sociology, rural and urban sociology, and the sociology of the arts, business, and education.

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts provides abstracts and indexing of the international literature of political science and international relations, along with complementary fields, including international law and public administration/policy. The database provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews drawn from over 1,500+ serials publications and also provides abstracts of books, book chapters, dissertations, and working papers.