The Sheridan Libraries recently purchased a new online resource, that will be of immense value to humanities scholarship, maybe even scholarship in general. I’m talking about the Cambridge Companions Online, a collection of nearly 500 online books in literature, religion, philosophy, music, classics and cultural studies.
The revered publisher, Cambridge University Press, has a long tradition of publishing works of serious and valuable scholarship. In the online world, the Cambridge Histories are available, as well the Cambridge Journals. With this new series of digital texts, research in all areas of the humanities has opened up.
We have collected these gems of scholarship in print for a long time. They typically include both an overview/introduction of their subject, plus essays by recognized scholars on more narrowly-focused topics. And while individually each volume is an extremely useful introduction to a writer, a movement, a genre, or to a subject area, now all 500 volumes are cross-searchable. The possibilities are endless! Think of the connections you can now make: between James Joyce and Italo Calvino, between Virginia Woolf and jazz, between African-American novels and France. With so much online content, the researcher now has a powerful tool to forge new connections and affinities.
Plus, new content continues to be added. Most recent additions include companions to: the Pre-Raphaelites, Cricket, Abraham Lincoln, Black Theology, Choral Music, and European Novelists. How’s that for interdisciplinarity?!