Add us to your library's A-Z database list instantly!
We've created brief descriptions for each of our Commons modules below. Simply copy and paste the text, and make access seamless for your library's users with the affiliated entry links.
Policy Commons
Global Think Tanks
Global Think Tanks is a living database of research produced by the world’s leading policy experts, think tanks, research centers, IGOs, and NGOs. Access to more than 30 million pages of curated, high quality policy reports, briefs, analyses, working papers, and datasets from 10,000 policy organizations. Global Think Tanks covers many disciplines—agriculture, energy, pharmaceuticals, diversity, crime, librarianship, and much more.
North American City Reports
North American City Reports preserves the full text of surveys, budgets, statistical records, case studies, planning documents, training manuals, policy guidelines, reports, and news from 1000 of the world’s major cities. The living database provides unique content from the Global South and cities with particular research importance, such as those dealing with climate change, political instability, or rapid growth.
World Cities
World Cities preserves the full text of surveys, budgets, statistical records, case studies, planning documents, training manuals, policy guidelines, reports, and news from the world’s top 100 cities by population, capital cities with populations greater than 20,000 people, major cities in the Global South, and cities with particular research importance, such as those dealing with climate change, political instability, or rapid growth.
World Governments
World Governments includes comprehensive coverage of the UK, Ireland, Canada, US Federal agencies, and Oceania (including Australia and New Zealand), with additional select coverage of another 700 national, state, and regional governments and agencies from more than 180 countries. With one place to search government documents from around the world, users can compare policies across regions.
Public Health and Social Care
Frontline health providers, hospital systems, foundations, patient groups, practitioner communities, governments, think tanks, and other organizations produce research, pilot projects, real-world evaluations, newsletters, and collaborative projects. Public Health and Social Care brings this wealth of information together, updates it daily, adds search tools and unique identifiers—and preserves the material for future reference.
Policy Commons: Oceania
A major new initiative to collect, preserve, and disseminate critical research from Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands, Policy Commons: Oceania provides the region's perspective on topics including climate change, indigenous rights, the economy, housing, healthcare, and ageing.
Africa Commons
History and Culture
Africa Commons: History and Culture is a comprehensive database for searching and discovering African materials from 1500 to today. It indexes African organizations, collections, and documents from archives around the world. Find books, magazines, newspapers, historical journals, government documents, oral history, photographs, art, music, videos, and more.
Black South African Magazines
Black South African Magazines is the first and only digital collection of magazines created for Black audiences in Africa from 1937 to 1973. Find over 50,000 pages of extremely rare, yet historically significant magazines, written for Black African audiences. Coverage includes Drum, Zonk!, The Townships Housewife, Hi-Note, and others.
Southern African Films and Documentaries
With content spanning the 1900s to present, Southern African Films and Documentaries offers—for the first time—streaming access to more than a century of African history, politics, and culture. Propaganda films from South Africa’s Information Service and newsreels from African Mirror, showing life under apartheid and major historical events as they unfolded (Rand rebellion, Africa during WWII, mining industry efforts, the Soweto uprising, the Rhodesian Bush War, and other topics). Documentaries and interviews (e.g., unedited interviews of Winnie Mandela and Oliver Tambo), sociopolitical documentary films such as Sharpeville Massacre; Side by Side: Women Against Aids in Zimbabwe; We are Marching to Pretoria, Voices of Robben Island, and Black Beulahs. Feature films, such as African Jim from 1949, South Africa’s first feature film, showing a picture of vibrant township culture before apartheid.
East African Magazines, Newspapers, and Films: The Hilary Ng’weno Archive
East African Magazines, Newspapers, and Films: The Hilary Ng’weno Archive presents more than 100,000 pages of groundbreaking newspapers and magazines as well as documentaries and oral histories produced by Ng’weno’s media company. Hilary Ng’weno (1938-2021) stands as a pivotal figure in the history of postcolonial East Africa. Considered Kenya’s most accomplished journalist, he’s renowned for his commitment to investigative journalism, incisive analysis, and tireless pursuit of accountability for those in positions of power.
Mindscape Commons
Mindscape Commons is the first and only database to document and deliver more than 300 immersive, interactive, and virtual-reality (VR) experiences for education in mental health, with over 150 exclusive, originally created, licensed, and commissioned experiences. VR experiences let the student walk in another’s shoes—to feel what it’s like to be bullied, suffer from depression or anxiety, be homeless, or face immigration challenges or racism. Virtual case studies put students face-to-face with patients exhibiting anxiety, trauma, and other presenting symptoms. Moments of Excellence in Counseling guide students through therapy session best practices.
Canada Commons
Canada Commons brings rare, hard-to-find content from Canada that’s relevant to a wide range of studies including sociology, anthropology, business and economics. Find over 22,000 e-books from scholarly and independent publishers and 250,000 public policy papers from think tanks and other policy organizations.
Canada Commons: Government
Canada Commons: Government is an index to, and collection of, over 1 million publications from more than 500 unique government sources. For the first time, federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal reports of research value—as well as literature from major political parties—are made discoverable in a single site.
South Asia Archive
South Asia Archive is a landmark collection of 4.5 million pages of documents from across the Indian subcontinent from 1700 to 1953, originally collected by the South Asian Research Foundation (SARF). It’s the largest collection of books, journals and documents from the region, covering India, Pakistan, Burma, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh, now online, indexed, and searchable for the first time. On the Coherent South Asia Commons platform.
History Commons
Secret Files from World Wars to Cold War
Secret Files from World Wars to Cold War contains British government secret intelligence and foreign policy files from 1936 to 1953, with a focus on World War II. Sourced from the National Archives (UK) and available electronically for the first time. Explore secret intelligence files from four key 20th-century conflicts—the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the early years of the Cold War, and the Korean War.
URL: https://history-commons.net/modules/secret-files-from-world-wars-to-cold-war/
Weimar and Nazi Germany
Weimar and Nazi Germany documents an intense time of hyperinflation, political extremism, and seizures of power. It details the aftermath of World War I, recovery following the war, the Great Depression, and Hitler’s rise, providing contemporaneous accounts, documents, reports, and correspondence of how Western democracies struggled with fascism and autocracy.
URL: https://history-commons.net/modules/weimar-and-nazi-germany/
Cold War Eastern Europe
Cold War Eastern Europe, sourced exclusively from The National Archives (UK), lets us look into the workings of every country in the Eastern Bloc during the post-Stalin era, through thousands of English-language insights written in the first person by officials of the time. Read the British Foreign Office’s reporting on state leadership, party politics, protest movements, agricultural output, international trade agreements, scientific progress, minority populations, state-run media, and popular culture behind The Iron Curtain.
URL: https://history-commons.net/modules/cold-war-eastern-europe-1947-1982/
British Society, 1939-1951
Sourced from the National Archives (UK) and the History of Advertising Trust, British Society, 1939-1951 includes previously undigitized files from eleven government departments, with associated adverts and propaganda. It documents stories told through the eyes and words of women, children, refugees, and other groups often underrepresented in historical accounts. Covering topics including food, morale, crime, and economic hardships, the documents present voices from the top of government alongside the narratives and testimonies of ordinary citizens.
URL: https://history-commons.net/modules/british-society-1939-1951/