Revolution and Protest Online; ProQuest

CONTENT Alexander Street’s Revolution and Protest Online, a key component of the Global Issues Library, is a curated multimedia collection that provides coverage of over 40 protest and revolution movements from the 18th through the 21st centuries. Coverage starts with the American Revolution of 1776 and continues through Arab Spring in the early 2010s. The collection aims to assist students and researchers in investigating how such moments have spurred change and affected people. Database contents are organized around 30-plus themes, events, and areas representing various time periods, regions, and topics. Examples include the Cuban Revolution, spanning over 50 years, from 1953 to 2011, and the Egyptian Revolution, which took place in 1952. The amount of content varies significantly from one theme to another.  

The collection includes 235 videos and over 10,000 books and documents, totaling more than 100,000 pages of information. Resources are drawn from the UK National Archives, University of London, Georgetown University, WGBH Educational Foundation, and various university imprints, including Cambridge University Press, Columbia University Press, and Cornell University Press. Items include archival content, primary-source material, editorial commentary, ephemera, reports, monographs, speeches, journals, and more, primarily related to politics, policy, history, and diplomacy. Government and institutional documents comprise more than 75 percent of the books and documents; more than half of the videos are interviews, with many lacking captions.

USABILITY Navigating content from the homepage is somewhat challenging and occasionally counterintuitive. At the top of the page under the content description is a search box, which seems to be a simple keyword search that looks through all content on the site. However, a search using the word “Cuba” brings up 25 videos, whereas clicking on “Cuban Revolution” under featured events returns only six recordings. This lack of consistency in search results may prevent users from finding the content they need. 

Presentation on the main page is also problematic, as the content categories are presented on a rotating bar, which may create accessibility issues. For example, the tool to browse various items rotates through 12 categories, displaying only four at a time and hiding the remaining eight. Below the rotating bar, nine featured events are displayed, but there are over 40 events in the resource, which raises the question of why only nine are highlighted. Usability improves once a user clicks on one of the items or performs an advanced search; yet even within that, all areas of special interest in the entire Global Issues Library are clicked by default. This may falsely lead users to think those areas reside within the collection.

PRICING The resource is available to academic, public, and school libraries perpetually at a one-time cost with a minimal annual maintenance fee. The perpetual pricing is based on factors such as, but not limited to, geographic location, the size of that specific location(s), and the type of institution.

VERDICT Revolution and Protest Online provides access to excellent primary resources, but there is room for improvement in terms of usability and accessibility. Best for higher-education students, with instructional utility for instructors.