Daily Life Online

Daily Life Online is a fascinating database on social history throughout time and throughout the world. Information is retrieved from books, articles, selected websites, primary documents, images, and maps.

Accessible via the library's databases page (http://www.swccd.edu/~library/articles.htm), this database can be searched with keywords in both the basic and an advanced mode, the browse feature is useful when you want to narrow a topic, step-by-step. You can browse by subject, by region, and by time period.

For instance, I wanted to find out how people viewed food in the middle ages. I started browsing by subject and chose “Food & Drink”. From there I chose the region I wanted – “Europe”, then the time period Medieval (5th century – 14th century). 138 entries were listed. I found my particular question on balancing the ‘humors’ in the entry “Cooking in Europe – 1250-1650 – Influence of Health Concerns”. All of the entries were relatively short, so I looked through a couple likely ones and not only found my ‘answer’ but also found information on other interesting topics.

Daily Life Online includes many popular topics such as the role of women throughout history, and contains a wealth of information drawn from folklore and literature. You can also browse through the list of full text titles the database has used, and directly browse the contents of each particular electronic book. For teachers there are lesson plans under “Teacher Resources”. Take time to explore Daily Life Online: it is an entertaining database with unexpected treasures!

To access this database from off campus, follow the instructions for Remote Access.

Review by Ann Willard, SWC Librarian