Foundation Center - Catalog of Nonprofit Literature

 

Foundation Center - Catalog of Nonprofit Literature

 

Contents and Scope

The Catalog of Nonprofit Literature contains citations to materials collected by the Center's five libraries as well as selected literature from other sources. This authoritative bibliography of works in the field of philanthropy contains approximately 27,000 bibliographic entries, of which nearly 19,000 have abstracts. To view the latest additions to the database by subject category, see New Acquisitions in the Online Library.

Since 1988, when a retrospective conversion of all the Center's holdings was completed and a new bibliographic service unit was created, the Foundation Center has sought to increase public access to information on philanthropy and the nonprofit sector by identifying, indexing, and abstracting relevant books, articles, and non-print resources such as CD-ROM and audiovisual materials. To this end, the Center established a computerized database and began issuing annual printed volumes of The Literature of the Nonprofit Sector.

The first volume of The Literature of the Nonprofit Sector was published in 1989 and was the culmination of nearly a decade of planning. This first volume was welcomed by scholars at the time as the "single most indispensable research into the printed record of the nonprofit field." The annual supplements the Center continued to publish through 1996 were equally well received.

In 1997, in lieu of printing a ninth volume, the Center released the Catalog of Nonprofit Literature, a comprehensive searchable database that includes all the citations that would have appeared in print in the ninth volume and also cumulates the citations from the eight preceding volumes. This was the first database the Foundation Center put on the Internet, and the first time this valuable research tool was available in a searchable, user-friendly format to those seeking information on the literature of philanthropy.

In December 2000, the Catalog of Nonprofit Literature was further enhanced by the addition of three new search fields (publisher, library location, and record type) so that users can select among a total of nine search criteria. New software was acquired that enabled the database to be updated instantly, and two new report formats were added. More bibliographic data was added, such as the call number for the materials in the Center's libraries, and the Catalog of Nonprofit Literature became the libraries' in-house bibliographic catalog, as well as a unique database accessible universally on the Internet.

During 2001, in a collaboration with the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy, the Catalog of Nonprofit Literature has been further enhanced by an initiative to add links to the full-texts of selected journal articles. At this time, Grassroots Fundraising Journal, NonProfit Times, Nonprofit Quarterly, Contributions, and Stanford Social Innovation Review have pioneered in this major step forward. We will be adding new journals to the full-text project on a regular basis.

Foundation Center - Catalog of Nonprofit Literature