Researchers are overwhelmed…

Subject selectors are over-extended…

Collection strategists need a unified resource…

There is a glaring omission in the mosaic of scholarly information sources. Paratext has heeded the call.

Libraries spend millions each year providing access to web-based research databases, from PsycInfo and Foreign Trade Statistics to the Digital Archives of Medieval Culture.

But where does one see them all? Who produces them? Are they Open Access or fee-based? Do these have identifiable research value?

Most important of all, how much time is required for all of this?

bird is a new, ongoing initiative, created by research librarians, to identify and catalog the universe of web-based research databases found in academic libraries.

How was the bird title list developed?

Editorial analysis of bird: Base Inventory of Research Databases began in 2021. After deduplicating, normalizing, and removing out-of-scope titles from our initial lists, the bird founding team identified approximately 7,600 unique research database titles.

The editorial team is continually engaged in discovering new titles; titles that are available but no longer updated; as well as titles that have ceased publication.

The content within bird reflects U.S. academic interests. The number of titles by academic disciplines show the popularity of career-focused departments (such as business/economics, engineering, medicine, public health, law, and nursing), as well as the demand for liberal arts and social science materials.

The bird editorial team established the following guidelines for the inclusion of a title in bird. A database:

• Must support scholarly research undertaken at the college and university level.
• May be broad or narrow in scope, but must have value beyond a small geographic area.
• May cover a wide range of publication types, or may be limited to one format.
• May be complete or may grow as content is added.
• May or may not be free to use.
• While most titles are in English, Spanish, German and French, there are strong collections in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese reflecting the global research environment.