Type of site | Online digital library |
---|---|
Available in | English |
Founded | 1998 |
Dissolved | December 21, 2020 |
Headquarters | Chicago, Illinois, United States |
Owner | Gale |
Commercial | Yes |
Current status | Closed |
Questia was an online commercial digital repository of books and articles that had an academic orientation, [1] with a particular emphasis on books and journal articles in the humanities and social sciences. All the text in all the Questia books and articles were available to subscribers; the site also included integrated research tools. It was founded in 1998 and ceased operations in December 2020.
Questia, based in Chicago, Illinois, was founded in 1998 and purchased by Gale, part of Cengage Learning, in January 2010. [2] [3]
Questia offered some information free of charge, including several public domain works, publication information, tables of contents, the first page of every chapter, Boolean searches of the contents of the library, and short bibliographies of available books and articles on some 6,500 topics.
Questia did not sell ownership to books or ebooks, but rather sold monthly or annual subscriptions that allowed temporary online reading access to all 94000+ books, and 14 million + journal, magazine, and newspaper articles in their collection. The books were selected by academic librarians as credible, authoritative works in their respective areas. The librarians also compiled about 7000 reference bibliographies on frequently researched topics. The library was strongest in books and journal articles in the social sciences and humanities, with many older historical texts. Original pagination was maintained. The Questia service also featured tools to automatically create citations and bibliographies, helping writers to properly cite the materials.
A limitation to the Questia library was that new additions were available in a "beta" version only. Unlike Questia's earlier publications, these prevented users from copying text directly from the website, although one page from the publications could be printed free of charge. A charge was made for printing a range of pages.
Questia launched their Q&A blog on September 21, 2011. [4] Q&A was divided into "Education news," "Student resources" and "Subjects" categories. "Subjects" was further broken down so readers could find specific content based on their academic needs. [5]
Questia released an iPhone app in 2011, which was extended to the iPad the following year. [6] Then in January 2013 Questia launched tutorials, including videos and quizzes, to teach students the research process. [7]
Questia was criticized in 2005 by librarian Steven J. Bell for referring to itself as an academic library, when it concentrated on the liberal arts and treated users as customers rather than students. Moreover, Bell argued, Questia did not employ academic librarians or faculty. Although some of its employees had advanced library degrees, they did not work or collaborate with faculty to develop collections that served distinctive student populations. [8]
Electronic publishing includes the digital publication of e-books, digital magazines, and the development of digital libraries and catalogues. It also includes the editing of books, journals, and magazines to be posted on a screen.
Bibliography, as a discipline, is traditionally the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology. English author and bibliographer John Carter describes bibliography as a word having two senses: one, a list of books for further study or of works consulted by an author ; the other one, applicable for collectors, is "the study of books as physical objects" and "the systematic description of books as objects".
This page is a glossary of library and information science.
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.
An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and discussion of research. They nearly universally require peer review for research articles or other scrutiny from contemporaries competent and established in their respective fields.
Gale is a global provider of research and digital learning resources. The company is based in Farmington Hills, Michigan, United States, west of Detroit. It has been a division of Cengage since 2007.
A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records. This is an organised online collection of references to published written works like journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, patents and books. In contrast to library catalogue entries, a majority of the records in bibliographic databases describe articles and conference papers rather than complete monographs, and they generally contain very rich subject descriptions in the form of keywords, subject classification terms, or abstracts.
The Harmer E. Davis Transportation Library —also known as the Institute of Transportation Studies Library (ITSL), the Berkeley Transportation Library, or simply as the Transportation Library— is a transportation library at the University of California, Berkeley, devoted to transportation studies.
Project MUSE, a non-profit collaboration between libraries and publishers, is an online database of peer-reviewed academic journals and electronic books. Project MUSE contains digital humanities and social science content from some 400 university presses and scholarly societies around the world. It is an aggregator of digital versions of academic journals, all of which are free of digital rights management (DRM). It operates as a third-party acquisition service like EBSCO, JSTOR, OverDrive, and ProQuest.
Zotero is free and open-source reference management software to manage bibliographic data and related research materials, such as PDF and ePUB files. Features include web browser integration, online syncing, generation of in-text citations, footnotes, and bibliographies, integrated PDF, ePUB and HTML readers with annotation capabilities, and a note editor, as well as integration with the word processors Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, and Google Docs. It was originally created at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and, as of 2021, is developed by the non-profit Corporation for Digital Scholarship.
The Explicator is a peer-reviewed, quarterly journal of literary criticism. It began publication in October 1942 and is now both printed and available in an electronic version. Routledge acquired the journal from Heldref Publications in 2009, and now it is owned by Taylor & Francis. Issues often include between 25 and 30 articles on works of literature, "ranging from ancient Greek and Roman times to our own, from throughout the world." According to a library guide, "As the title of the journal suggests, the focus is on explication, or close readings, of the works. As such, the articles tend to use less jargon and are easier to understand than some other articles in literature studies."
Papers is a reference management software for Mac OS X and Windows, used to manage bibliographies and references when writing essays and articles. It is primarily used to organize references and maintain a library of PDF documents and also provides a uniform interface for document repository searches, metadata editing, full screen reading and, a variety of ways to import and export documents.
Mindomo is a versatile freemium collaborative mind mapping, concept mapping and outlining tool developed by Expert Software Applications. It can be used to develop ideas and interactively brainstorm, with features including sharing, collaboration, task management, presentation and interactive web publication.
HighBeam Research was a paid search engine and full text online archive owned by Gale, a subsidiary of Cengage, for thousands of newspapers, magazines, academic journals, newswires, trade magazines, and encyclopedias in English. It was headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. In late 2018, the archive was shut down.
American Literature is a literary journal published by Duke University Press. It is sponsored by the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association. The current editors are Priscilla Wald and Matthew A. Taylor. The first volume of this journal was published in March 1929. Founders include Fred Lewis Pattee, among others.
Nota Bene is an integrated software suite of applications, including word processing, reference management, and document text analysis software that is focused on writers and scholars in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts. The integrated suite is referred to as the Nota Bene Workstation. It runs on Microsoft Windows and Macintosh.
A pathfinder is a bibliography created to help begin research in a particular topic or subject area.. Pathfinders produced by the Library of Congress are known as "tracer bullets". What is special about a pathfinder is that it only refers to the information in a specific location, i.e. the shelves of a local library.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) is a digital collection of books published in Great Britain during the 18th century.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to books:
Sithu Thaw Kaung is a Burmese university librarian, historian and leading authority in Asian library studies. He specializes in the preservation and archival of traditional documents, including palm leaf manuscripts.