Ebsco ISCTRC takes global perspective on security

I've been reviewing the new interface on Ebsco's database, International Security & Counter-Terrorism Reference Center, for the next issue of IWR.

It's an impressive resource, bringing together relevant materials from a wide range of global sources - academic journals, government documents, mags, newspapers and reference books. Alongside these, there's country reports from Datamonitor and the EIU, as well as proprietary Ebsco-generated profiles and background reports.

One of my key concerns in advance of looking at this full-text database, and its cleaner interface and more powerful search, was that much of the marketing material has been so US-centric.

When you log in to the database, the homepage is very much geared to its core US market. The spotlight  is on the 9-11 Commission report (even though it was released in 2004), but probably understandable as this is the central concern of all US security and counter-terrorism policy these days.

And at first glance, the Common Topics (which are really advanced search strings that bring up a lot of wide-ranging material on a specific topic) appear to be from a US perspective (Homeland Security sticks out - no other English-speaking country that I know of uses the phrase). But on further investigation, many of the Common Topics bring up material with global reach.

And once you start searching for specific global security concerns, the database proves its worth. A search on "London bombings" returned 1050 links; though a more specific search on "London July bombings" brought up just one article (ironically, from The Australian newspaper).

A search on "Basra" returned 1554 results, including Iranian News Agency reports and abstracts on video clips from Arabic TV. A search on "chemical AND weapons AND UK" returned 62 results, though little of recent relevance. Tony Blair's report on WMDs in Iraq may not have been a great deal richer as a result of access to this database, but for many researchers on the subject it will bring many useful perspectives.