History of the Social Science Library:
The creation of the SSL was motivated by frequent requests received by GDAE from under-resourced libraries seeking copies of the six books in our series, Frontier Issues in Economic Thought. (These books are described, and may be found in full in the SSL, via the Special Collections link on the menu bar.) The Institute’s funding did not allow us to cover the cost of so many mailings of heavy books; hence we decided to seek grants to put the full Frontiers series on CD-ROM. Our first funder (the Ford Foundation) pointed out that a CD could hold more than six books, and suggested that more materials be included. Our first thought was to include all of the 475 original articles that were summarized, but not presented in full, in the Frontiers books. Finding that many copyright holders would not give permission for free reproduction for these articles, we sought for other articles that fell into the same general category as those we had selected for the Frontiers project: that is, excellent writings that demonstrate how knowledge and understanding developed in the social sciences can contribute to sustainable development and human well-being.
The work of creating the SSL took nearly seven years. The most time-consuming elements were the selection of approximately 9,000 articles and book chapters, according to the criteria listed under “Selection Criteria”; organization of the selections in the hierarchical system described in How to Use the SSL Organization of the Collection, and corresponding with copyright holders for permission to include their works in the SSL.
The initial SSL was distributed via CD and USB drives to universities in 136 designated recipient countries. The material distributed to these universities included full-access to about one-third of the 9,000 articles, where permission was obtained to share these articles to designated recipients. However, we do not have the permission to share these articles freely on the online platform for SSL. What we have included here is links to articles, where they can be accessed online.
Selection criteria for the Social Science Library:
The articles in the Social Science Library have been drawn mostly from the published work of exemplary academic social scientists. The researchers at the Global Development And Environment Institute who selected materials for the collection used the following criteria:
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- To provide excellent examples of how social science is done and written about
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- To provide a focus on the concepts of human well-being and sustainability and to include the work of key authors whose orientation closely aligns with these concepts
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- While our sustainable development/well-being emphasis gives us certain obvious biases (e.g., toward poverty reduction, against racial, class or gender discrimination, etc.) we try to represent the middle ground as well as “left” (or liberal) and “right” (conservative) views on each debate.
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- To emphasize topics that will be of interest to those working to balance the need for economic growth with the need for environmental and social sustainability.
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- To balance attention to ‘theory’, ‘policy’, and ‘applied/empirical’ work.
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- In the ‘applied/empirical’ area, to strike a regional balance among Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union/East-Central Europe.
Founders
The Social Science Library is a project of the Global Development And Environment Institute (GDAE) at Tufts University, in conjunction with the UN Decade for Education in Sustainable Development. The following are the individuals who are responsible for the creation of the SSL.
Neva Goodwin, Distinguished Fellow Economics in Context Initiative (ECI)
Jonathan Harris, Senior Research Fellow Economics in Context Initiative (ECI)
Brian Roach, Senior Research Fellow Economics in Context Initiative (ECI)
All of the following members of the SSL Editorial and Production Staff were employed by GDAE for the tasks indicated, unless otherwise noted: