feb06c.indd I n t e r n e t R e v i e w s Joni R. Roberts and Carol A. Drost Davidson Data Center and Network. Access: http://ddcn.prowebis.com. Researchers and students seeking down­ loadable, free data on transition and emerg­ ing economies will find the Davidson Data Center and Network (DDCN) database a valuable resource. The site provides access to socioeconomic data provided to DDCN by researchers, as well as links to sites containing data collected by other research institutions, multinational organizations such as the World Bank and the United Nations, and governmental agencies. Most of the data are available for download after a one­time free registration, although some data are provided by commercial vendors for a fee. Funding is provided by the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan and by a seed grant from the National Science Foundation. Users can search by keyword within the title, abstract, country, and data provider or use advanced search features to combine terms or specify dates or types of data. Us­ ers can also browse holdings by subject or country. Macroeconomic data includes such categories as “Fiscal Data,” “Enterprises and Privatization,” “Poverty and Income Inequal­ ity,” and “Governance and Anti­Corruption.” Examples of microeconomic data include “La­ bor Force Surveys” and “Census Data,” while firm level data include “Enterprise Surveys” and “Bank Surveys.” The “Related Resources” section provides a list of browsable indexes and reports con­ cerning emerging and transition economies, and selected articles addressing the datasets available via DDCN. Data are downloadable either in a zipped Excel or PDF file and can be viewed in HTML. Joni R. Roberts is associate university librarian for public ser vices and collec tion development at Willamette University, e-mail: jroberts@willamette. edu, and Carol A. Drost is associate university librarian for technical services at Willamette University, e-mail: cdrost@willamette.edu Some links to data outside the DDCN database, especially to the World Bank, were not current. A description of each dataset includes time period, country or countries covered, data category, type, frequency, unit of observa­ tion, number of observations, an abstract, variables, any articles or working papers associated with the data, funding agency (if available), data location, data access, cost (if any), and when the dataset description was added to the DDCN database. Some of the data cover time periods up to 2003 and cover a span of many years. Dates as far back as 1890 were found. Upper­level undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers will find this site useful.—Britt Fagerheim, Utah State Univer- sity, britt.fagerheim@usu.edu Library, Information Science and Technology Abstracts. Access: http://www.libraryre­ search.com. EBSCO has been providing services to libraries for more than a half a century. EB­ SCOhost’s databases are widely used around the world and EBSCOhost recently released, only to its licensed clients (subscribers to other EbscoHost and/or Novel databases), access to the database Library, Information Science and Technology Abstracts (LISTA). Coverage is from the mid­1960s to present and LISTA includes resources in such areas as librarianship, classifi cation, cataloging, bibliometrics, online information retrieval, and information science. LISTA has more than 21,000 articles from more than 600 periodicals and includes more than 5,000 conference papers and reports. Librarians, library students, information scientists, and many other researchers will applaud the free access to this specialized Web­based database. The EBSCOhost LISTA database, like other EBSCOhost databases, offers an uncomplicated, easy to understand search interface. The database has several C&RL News February 2006 110 http:search.com http://www.libraryre mailto:britt.fagerheim@usu.edu mailto:cdrost@willamette.edu http:http://ddcn.prowebis.com search options including “Basic Search,” “Advanced Search,” “Indexes” and “Cited References.” Some of the nicest features of the database are the cited references and the number of times the source was cited within the database. These features are very useful for reference librarians and research­ ers, whose need for knowing the number of times a source is cited can be as essential as the bibliography. Index browsing can be done using the drop­down menu on the screen or by using tags for selected fi elds in the database. Users won’t find all the same features and add­ons they would generally get from a full­ text version of the database. For instance, there are no thesauri browsing or images and publication search features. Search limiters allow users to select the Document Type to limit searches to dissertations, case studies, conferences, and other resources. In “Advanced Search,” users are able to do a related words search. Searchers can sign up for a personal account and receive alerts, save persistent links and searches, and more. The database offers users the ability to e­ mail, save, or print search results. The EBSCOhost interface is simple to use and easy to grasp. LISTA may be a free abstract database but, in the near future, there is talk that it will be full text. Of course, once that happens, it will no longer be free access, but until then, users can search for the full­text version of an article from another EBSCOhost database.—Aisha Peña, Baruch College (CUNY), Aisha_Pena@baruch.cuny.edu Speech Accent Archive. Access: http://accent. gmu.edu. Everyone who speaks a language speaks it with an accent, according to the Speech Accent Archive, maintained by Steven H. Weinburger from George Mason University. The archive uniformly presents speech accents from a variety of linguistic back­ grounds for analysis and comparison. Speech samples from native and non­na­ tive speakers of English reading the same paragraph are available on the Web site in Quicktime format. The site also provides information about the demographic and linguistic background of each speaker, including place of birth and age at which the speaker began studying English. This makes it possible to compare variations in accent among native speakers of a particular language, for example, native speakers of French from Canada, France, and several African countries. The recorded paragraph contains practi­ cally all of the sounds of English, includ­ ing a variety of difficult sounds and sound sequences. Most recordings also have phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet and phonological gen­ eralizations, which indicate variations from “General American English” (a dialect based on speech patterns common in the Mid­ west and perceived as “accentless” by most Americans). For example, many speakers systematically “devoice” or drop fi nal con­ sonants in English (such as the final “b” in “Bob”) or shorten or insert vowels. Users can easily browse the archive by language of the speaker and select samples based on basic demographic information, such as a female from Perth, Australia, or a male from Glasgow, Scotland, from among the 126 samples of native English speak­ ers. It is also possible to browse by region of the world using a clickable map and to combine different variables in a search of the database. Native phonetic inventories identify the sounds found in most native dialects of a language. The methodology for recording and analyzing samples is explained in detail on the site. New samples, transcriptions, and phonological generalizations are added regularly. There is an extensive bibliogra­ phy and a short, but excellent, list of Web resources that provide more information on world languages, phonetics, and accents. The Speech Accent Archive will be of great use to linguists, teachers of English as a second language, and actors who need (continued on page 118) February 2006 111 C&RL News http://accent mailto:Aisha_Pena@baruch.cuny.edu Wales. Later, she was awarded a Fulbright Travel Award for work at the British Library Document Supply Center on the econom­ ics of interlibrary loan and document sup­ ply services. She began her career at North­ eastern University, where she held positions in collection development, online search services, and serials. She taught courses in the Northeastern University library science minor program. She was active in ALA, in­ cluding service on the ACRL ULS Board and Program Committees, and numerous ALCTS committees, including the ALCTS Board of Directors, Budget and Finance Committee, and the Council of Regional Groups. She also served on the New York Library Association Executive Board when she was president of NYLA’s Section of Management of Resources and Technology, from which she received Professional Achievement Award in 2000. William Young, a member of the Refer­ ence Management Team of the University at Albany (UA) Libraries­State University of New York, retired on January 20, 2006, after 31 years of service to the library profession. Young began working at the UA Libraries in 1980, where he served as a member of the reference group and was twice selected to be the team leader. In his retirement, Young plans to work in the private sector. D e a t h s Gerald Hodges, 61, ALA associate executive director for communications and market­ ing, has died. Hodges joined the ALA staff in 1989 as director of Membership Services and the Chapter Rela­ tions Office. His fi rst professional job was as head librarian and Spanish teacher at Florida Central Acad­ emy in Sorrento fromGerald Hodges 1968 to 1970. A longtime member and sup­ porter of ALA, Hodges had stipulated that a portion of his estate be used to establish the Gerald Hodges Fund, in support of intellectual freedom issues and legal challenges to legisla­ tion such as the Children’s Internet Protection Act and the USA Patriot Act. Hodges had also asked that, inlieu of flowers, memorial contri­ butions be made to the Gerald Hodges Fund. Make checks payable to the American Library Association, 50 East Huron Street, Chicago, IL 60611, and send to the attention of Judith Krug, director, Office for Intellectual Freedom. (“Internet Reviews” continued from page 111) to learn a particular accent. Researchers will appreciate the detailed and careful analysis of the language samples and the ability to compare and contrast accents using different variables. Those who simply enjoy listening to and learning about accents will also fi nd this site worthwhile.—Lori Robare, University of Oregon, lrobare@uoregon.edu C&RL News February 2006 118 mailto:lrobare@uoregon.edu