Earlier this year Readex launched a new suite of online resources on the crucial issues that shaped the post-World War II world. The suite is titled Twentieth-Century Global Perspectives and includes collections covering apartheid, the Cold War, migrations and refugees, race relations in the United States, and more. The content—from the archives of the C.I.A. and available nowhere else in fully searchable form—includes translated radio broadcasts, foreign-government reports, journal articles, television transcripts, and news items of various kinds.

Each of these primary source collections provides students and scholars with perspectives from outside of the United States. Such views are crucial to the proper understanding of world issues and shed enormous light on how nations across the globe responded to emerging matters of geo-political importance.

Over the past six months Readex has received requests from users to provide “pathways” into the content that enable deep research on key themes and topics.

“Can you develop some kind of drill-down so I can get to a subject quickly and save time?” asked a student. Another user recommended “coding” the content by theme to help “whittle down” the results to something “more manageable.”

To meet such requests for Twentieth-Century Global Perspectives, Readex has now released a new feature designed to “drill down” by pre-set subject and to generate a rich but not overwhelming set of the “best” results. We call this feature “Suggested Searches.” It is designed to give instant access to many of the most important documents available. This enables students (and others) to zoom into the commentary and quickly grasp crucial concepts and perspectives.

This feature is more than just a time-saver. “Suggested Searches” actually supports the quality of research by “finding” the materials of greatest value and significance.

For example, a student writing a term paper on “Cold War Turning Points” will find a number of paths to explore:

By clicking on a Suggested Search, a results list is generated (see below) that immediately reveals the scope, size and coverage of the topic in question. If a user didn’t already have a specific subject in mind, the list of options can be browsed for ideas, either by the main subject (“Cold War Turning Points”) or by a subset (any of the topics showing above against the white background).

In just one click a list of results is generated:

In this case I have chosen “Suez Crisis, 1956” for my example—a subject that will surely be of great interest when Season 2 of the new Netflix hit series “The Crown” is released, which will open with an account of the Suez Crisis faced by the government of UK Prime Minister Anthony Eden.

What better way to get started on a paper? And how better to produce a great paper than to use these vital materials as the foundation?

This is just one example of the many enhancements made to Readex interfaces over the past year. Others include complete interface refreshes for our major product lines, along with a new cross-search (“Readex AllSearch”) designed to make complicated searches much easier than ever before.

For more information about Twentieth-Century Global Perspectives, or to request a trial for your institution, please contact readexmarketing@readex.com.