CONTENT Migration to New Worlds is a collection of primary sources detailing the history of the movements of people to the United States, Canada, and Australasia, mainly from 1800 to 1924. There is material here both from earlier and later eras, such as oral histories dating back to the 1980s and 1990s. Recent content will be expanded in Module 2, the Modern Era, scheduled for 2017.

The focus of this collection is ­European emigration, with an emphasis on English, German, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish, Scandinavian, and Scottish experiences. Documentation of Chinese and Japanese migration to the United States is also ­included. Sources include diaries, manuscript correspondence, and travel journals.

A variety of international respositories are featured, such as the American Antiquarian Society, the British Library, the California Historical Society, the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, the Glenbow Museum, the Historical Society of ­Pennsylvania, the Maritime Museum of Tasmania, the Maritime Museum of San Diego, the National Archives of the UK, and the Tenement Museum of New York.

As a result, there is a broad array of documents through which to sort: advertisements, correspondence, illustrations and sketches, pamphlets, magazines and periodicals, maps, newspapers, oral histories, paintings, photographs, postcards, sheet music, shipping logs, and travelogs. Numerous items relate to finance, government, immigration, travel, and legal matters. Additionally, an interactive section allows the user to view tenement housing, an immigrant ship and a quarantine station, contextual essays, an interactive map, visual galleries, and online exhibitions.

usability The homepage offers a simple search box at the top right of the screen and a main toolbar below that with links to the “introduction,” “documents,” “explore,” “galleries,” and “oral histories.” This is also where users will find options to perform an advanced query or visit popular searches.

Most of the main screen is devoted to a carousel of illustrations of five system features: Oral Histories, Discover the Documents, Mapping Migration, Visual Galleries, and Explore. There are also quick links to Nature and Scope; Thematic Areas; Essays; Tenement Museum Apartments, New York; Star of India Emigrant Ship; and Grosse Île Island Narrative, as well as a guide to the resource that asks: “Not Sure Where To Start?”

After clicking on the guide, I found a tour that highlighted collection contents, documents, four interactive features (Migration Map; Tenement Museum Apartments, New York; Star of India Emigrant Ship; and Grosse Île Island Narrative), galleries (a main visual gallery, watercolors, and ship plans), audio and video (oral histories from the Tenement Museum, New York), and how to use My Archive.

My Archive is available via an omnipresent button above the search box. Once registered, patrons can store images in My Lightbox, where they can download individual lightboxes as PDFs for printing and saving, run slideshows for use in teaching and presentations, and save searches, documents, and media clips.

Help is available at all times, including a page-by-page guide that anticipates and answers questions that users are likely to pose. A FAQ section notes that, “Images from this collection may be downloaded, printed and photocopied for educational purposes, including course packs.”

Using the Explore option, I opened the Migration Map interactive feature. Within four minutes I received graphs and tables of the number of Italians who immigrated to the United States in 1820 (30) as compared with the number who emigrated in 1890, the year my grandfather arrived (52,003). The impressive patterns of emigration from Ireland to the United States between 1820 and 1997 are viewable by selecting “Play All,” a tool which cycles through each year showing numbers and percentages of emigrants, with the largest numbers in the 1840s and 1850s, topping out at over 221,000 in 1851 as a consequence of the potato famine.

Especially helpful is the Data Sources icon at the top right of the page, which provides data for the four target countries: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. Other interactive tools let users explore the presentation and items from two apartments in the Tenement Museum, New York and a map of “Grosse Île, near Québec City, which for most of the 19th century served as a key entry point for immigrants to Canada.

The Documents section permits investigation into actual individual experiences by type (more than 360 object images) and theme (arrivals, ports, and early experiences). An attempt to search by library and archive was unsuccessful as the system wouldn’t filter results by any options I selected. A clearer way to search by source would have been helpful.

Curiously, Document Type does not offer “diary” as a search option, although a simple query for the word received 211 results, including the First Diary of Sophie Puckette, 1892–1908, from the Glenbow Museum (“Sophie Puckette, who emigrated to Innisfree [originally Del Norte], Alberta from the USA in 1903, when she was eighteen years old. Includes descriptions of the family’s stay in the Immigration Hall in Strathcona, the trip to their homestead on sleighs, and life in their log cabin”). The image quality is solid, given the age and travels of many of these documents.

PRICING Adam Matthew titles are available at a onetime purchase price with no annual maintenance or cost-per-user fees. Purchase price depends on factors such as FTE, purchase history, and Carnegie Classification. A typical acquisition in 2016 will range between $22,500 and $75,000, depending on the institution. There is also an annual hosting fee of 0.5 percent. Subscribers may opt to pay an upfront fee of 7.5 percent of purchase price to cover perpetual hosting.

verdict Migration to New Worlds is a wonderful historical resource that takes advantage of current technology and search accessibility while retaining the best aspects of a large, informative archive. However, given the cost, the resource will likely only be within the means of large public and university libraries and library consortia serving scholars and students of world history. This reviewer is hopeful that future modules will be released at a more affordable price.

Cheryl LaGuardia is a Research Librarian for the Widener Library at Harvard University and author of Becoming a Library Teacher (Neal-Schuman, 2000). Readers can contact her at claguard@fas.harvard.edu

MyHeritage Library Edition EBSCO; www.ebscohost.com/public/myheritage-library-edition. To request a free trial, please visit the previous link

By Bonnie J.M. Swoger

CONTENT As a science librarian at an academic library, few things fill me with more professional anxiety than a patron starting a sentence with, “I’m doing some research on my family history....” As I’m less familiar with genealogical research, I typically refer local history questions to our special collections librarian. As a result, I approached EBSCO’s MyHeritage Library Edition (MHLE) as a novice user. This resource is the institutional version of MyHeritage.com (MH); the library edition was first released in October 2014.

Unlike the public-facing ­MH, MHLE doesn’t include family tree or social networking tools to connect users with one another. The library edition provides access to cvensus records and other documents useful to genealogists and anyone interested in family history. Users of MH pay additional fees for access to these resources. Researchers would need to use a separate family tree software package to help keep track of the information discovered in ­MHLE.

EBSCO indicates that the library version makes available more than six ­billion records. The database provides access to the U.S. federal census from 1790 to 1940, including printable and downloadable images of the individual census pages associated with a search result. Additional government documents include immigration records, citizenship and naturalization records, U.S. military records, and information gleaned from other public documents. International records include the Census of England and Wales (1841–1901) and millions of items from Nordic countries. Paperwork from sporadic censuses from other countries are also available, including Canada, Argentina, Lithuania, ­Germany, and many more.

MHLE provides access to many of the family-tree profiles submitted by MH members. Personal information of living people is generally kept private. For example, my search for my mother by name and birth year showed that she had siblings and children, but the first names of these individuals (including myself) were not ­included.

At the bottom of many pages, the “Record Detective” feature (complete with a detective icon with a deerstalker cap and magnifying glass) provides links to additional items. My search for my mother’s name led to a link to additional U.S. public records in which I could determine previous residences and phone numbers, all of which were accurate in her case.

usability The MHLE user interface is fairly straightforward to use, even if the records searched are quite complex. The basic query page allows patrons to enter a first and middle name, a last name, a year of birth (with a handy “calculate it” feature allowing one to submit an age and calculate an approximate birth year), a place (of birth or residence), and potential keywords. The examples given for keyword searches include occupations or military postings. There is also an option to perform an “exact” search, or allow the database to locate records that include spelling or date variations.

Initial “exact” searches in the library edition were problematic. I included my father’s year of birth in my search but was unable to find him in the 1940 census. After some sleuthing, I discovered that because he was one year old when the census was taken in 1940, his calculated date of birth was 1939. Unchecking the “exact” search box led me to the appropriate record. Experienced genealogists may likely be familiar with this element of calculation.

An easy-to-use map accompanying the basic and advanced search forms permits searching by a particular location. For most regions, the search can be limited to a specific country. For the United States and Canada, users can select a state or province. Place names can also be entered as a text-based search.

The advanced search screen has some additional useful features. An “Events” field permits users to enter the date of marriage, birth, death, military service, residence, and/or immigration. There are also options to add known relatives, identify unknown names, or to include the identity of a sibling, child, spouse, or parent. When available, this information can be incredibly useful for narrowing down potential matches, especially in cases of common names. Users can also restrict searches to record type. Initially, I limited my queries to U.S. Census records but quickly discovered (via the “Research Detective” feature) the usefulness of a wide range of sources.

Search results are sorted by relevance, but the large number of records can make general queries using only names rather frustrating. Thus, applying filters or additional terms is vital. Searches can be easily edited or refined by document type, name, birth year or birthplace, or parents’ names.

Unlike its competitor, ProQuest’s ­Ancestry Library Edition, MHLE provides off-site access to library card ­holders, which highly increases the tool’s usability among patrons.

PRICING Please contact EBSCO for ­detailed pricing information.

verdict MHLE is a straightforward database for searching a wide variety of genealogical sources. It could be improved with the option for users to save records to a personalized account or family-tree generating tools. The resource would be an excellent tool for public libraries or for academic institutions that serve an audience of family historians.

Bonnie J.M. Swoger is the Science and Technology Librarian at SUNY Geneseo’s Milne Library and the author of the Undergraduate Science Librarian blog, undergraduatesciencelibrarian.org. Readerscan contact her at swoger@geneseo.edu