About  CamdenBase

Scope
History
Contact Information
Usage Statistics

Scope

CamdenBase includes citations to articles, books, book chapters, government documents, and other published materials covering the political, social, and economic history of the city of Camden, New Jersey. General interest items, such as birth announcements, obituaries, marriage announcements, etc. are normally not included in the database unless the item had some kind of special regional significance. Coverage runs from 1945 to present. The database largely includes citations from articles about Camden published in the Courier-Post from mid-1999 to mid-2003. Abstracts for these citations are the lead paragraph for the article and are used with permission from the Courier Post.

Rutgers faculty, students, and staff wishing to access full-text Courier Post articles from 1999 to present may use Newspapers Database. Researchers unaffiliated with Rutgers University can access Newspapers Databases only if they access it in a Rutgers University Libraries building. Unaffiliated researchers do not have remote access to Newspapers Database. All researchers have access to the Courier Post on microfilm in the Robeson Library for full-text articles. Please see or call a reference librarian (link to reference web page) for assistance.

CamdenBase provides bibliographic access to over 6000 articles. Researchers can utilize either a keyword search or browse the database by subjects.

History

The Paul Robeson Library, which opened its doors in 1969, serves as general campus library for the Rutgers Camden campus. In addition to the over 5,000 Rutgers Camden students, faculty and staff that use the library, the Paul Robeson Library serves as a resource for a diverse local community. The CamdenBase project began as a newspaper clippings file of local interest stories in the early 1970s produced by Business Librarian, Tim Schiller. The clippings were kept in scrapbooks loosely organized by subject and date.

As the database file grew over the years, and as individual records became more cumbersome to access, Tim began an indexing system to make the retrieval easier. By the early 1980s, he began periodically producing a computer printout of the file, which included the indexing terms and a list of citations. Around this time, maintenance of the file became the responsibility of the Humanities Librarian, Jean Crescenzi.

In the late 1980s Jean took an academic leave to create a database for this file in order to facilitate searching. Though Jean retired in 1995, she remains actively involved in the CamdenBase project and the Camden County Historical Society.

In 1999, Paul Robeson Electronic Access Librarian, Ann Scholz-Crane and student computer technician, John Gibson along with Ron Jantz of the Rutgers University Libraries' Scholarly Communication Center converted the existing database into a format that could be accessed and searched via the World Wide Web.

Contact Information

If you have questions or suggestions concerning CamdenBase, please contact Theo Haynes, or Kim Gallon.

Statistics

Select here to view summary and detailed usage statistics for CamdenBase.

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