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Just the other day, I thought I had lost my public library card. As it turns out, I hadn’t, but my initial reaction—alarm!—led me to consider how the public library Internet resources that I now access from home have made this card a critical part of my intellectual life. You see, this card allows me, as well as all New Yorkers with public library cards, online access to databases that include articles from quality journals and periodicals not directly available online. In the last issue of Voices, I described some challenges that those outside academia have in accessing academic journal articles online. Here I’ll focus on resources available to all New Yorkers through a New York State Library program called New York Online Virtual Electronic Library (NOVEL). NOVEL’s online databases of articles and other content are designed for general rather than academic audiences, and in most cases include only recent years of journals or periodicals. Two of the databases, however, include full-text academic journal articles related to folklore and to the immigration and refugee issues featured in this issue of Voices. Even if you don’t live in New York State, your public library may provide these databases or others like them—so please read on. If you are in New York, you may be able to access some of the articles by signing on to your local library’s web site and using the barcode on the back of your library card. When New York libraries don’t provide database access through their web sites, users can call their local branches for specific database URLs and passwords. Consider this a brief overview of folklore-related resources available through the NOVEL program; additional information is available at www.novelnewyork.org. And don’t forget the resources available at your public library building! These include—of course—print resources not available digitally, as well as any additional subscription databases that may limit users to on-site access. EBSCO’s MasterFile Select is the NOVEL database most relevant to folklore. While this database does not include articles from folklore journals, it does feature culture-specific journals such as American Indian Quarterly, African American Review, African Arts, Arab Studies Quarterly, and Hispanic Review, as well as more general journals such as Journal of American Ethnic History, Journal of Social History, and Canadian Ethnic Studies. One article related to this Voices issue that appears in MasterFile Select is “Cambodian Refugees in Ontario: Religious Identities, Social Cohesion, and Transnational Linkages,” from Canadian Ethnic Studies. I will not cite authors for most of the articles mentioned here, but Voices readers will likely be familiar with Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Mary Hufford, Marjorie Hunt, and Steve Zeitlin. These folklorists recently published “Grand Generation: Folklore and the Culture of Aging” in Generations, another publication available in MasterFile Select. Chronicle of Higher Education Online, which from time to time addresses folklore and related fields, is also included, along with several publications treating culture more generally, such as National Geographic, Smithsonian, and American Heritage. Those with an interest in Spanish-speaking cultures might enjoy ¡Informe! (Revistas en Español), a NOVEL database produced by Thomson/Gale. This database offers many articles in Spanish, including some from Folklore Americano. It also includes several articles in English that are relevant to the theme of this issue of Voices: “The Changing Profile of Mexican Migrants to the United States: New Evidence from California and Mexico” (from Latin American Research Review) and “Mexicanness in New York: Migrants Seek New Place in Old Racial Order” (from NACLA Report on the Americas), for example. A number of New York libraries have upgraded their NOVEL MasterFile Select subscriptions to MasterFile Premier. This database includes the MasterFile Select journals, as well as several others of interest to folklorists. Two articles in the MasterFile Premier database from Journal of Cultural Geography are particularly relevant to this Voices issue: “Ethiopian Ethos and the Making of Ethnic Places in the Washington Metropolitan Area” and “Cultural Geography in the New Millennium: Translation, Borders, and Resistance.” Articles on Chinese immigration are also available: “The Impact of Continuing Chinese Immigration on Chinese American Life” (from Chinese American Forum) and “The Wenzhouese Community in New York City” (from Chinese American: History and Perspectives). A few New York public libraries provide online access to EBSCO’s Academic Search Premier. This database includes even more relevant journals—too many, in fact, to list here, but interested readers can download the titles from EBSCO’s web site. Some journals in the database of particular relevance to this Voices issue are Immigrants and Minorities, International Migration, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, Asian Folklore Studies, Folklore, and Journal of Popular Culture. Full text for the past year of some journals is not included in these databases. For example, when this column went to press, only the abstracts for two recent and extremely relevant special issues of Patterns of Prejudice—“The Cultural Politics of Multiculturalism” (December 2005) and “Boundaries, Identities, and Borders: Exploring the Cultural Production of Belonging” (July 2006)—were available through Academic Search Premier. Full-text articles from these issues are currently available through IngentaConnect and Metapress Routledge, but relatively few libraries nationwide subscribe to either database. Of course, if you just can’t wait for access, you can purchase and download the individual articles from the publisher’s web site—for $35.07 plus tax each. Perhaps you don’t yet have a public library card? The New York Folklore Society’s excellent web site, www.nyfolklore.org, which has folklore content (including selected articles from past Voices issues) as well as many interesting links, is an excellent place to start exploring the many folklore resources available directly on the Internet. Happy surfing!

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