The Black Studies Center brings together historical and contemporary material for researching the past, present, and future of African-Americans, the wider African Diaspora, and Africa itself. It is comprised of several cross-searchable component databases, including: Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, which examines interdisciplinary topics on the African experience throughout the Americas via in-depth essays, accompanied by detailed timelines along with research articles, images, film clips and more; the International Index to Black Periodicals (IIBP), which has current and retrospective bibliographic citations and abstracts from multi-disciplinary scholarly journals and newsletters from the U.S., Africa and the Caribbean, and full-text coverage of core Black Studies periodicals; The Chicago Defender, with 1910 to 1975 full-text presented from this influential black newspaper; ProQuest Dissertations for Black Studies, containing a thousand doctoral dissertations and Masters’ theses examining a wide variety of topics and subject areas relating to Black Studies; and the Black Literature Index, which enables users to search over 70,000 bibliographic citations for fiction, poetry and literary reviews published in 110 black periodicals and newspapers between 1827-1940.