Violence Literature Database (VioLit) Contents Merged To SafetyLit

By:
David W. Lawrence, Ph.D., Director of the SafetyLit Foundation
Beverly E. Kingston, Ph.D., Director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence

The VioLit database lost its funding and ceased adding new content several years ago. Now the VioLit database site is unavailable. Its contents have been transferred to the SafetyLit database.

VioLit, as the abbreviated title indicates, has been a bibliographic database about violence literature published by Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence (CSPV), a research program of the Institute of Behavioral Science (IBS) at the University of Colorado at Boulder. This database covers information about violence, primarily juvenile violence, from books, literature reviews, journal articles and reports. In recent years, funding problems have delayed posting of VioLit updates. For some time, the database has been off-line.

SafetyLit is a free service presented without advertising by the SafetyLit Foundation in cooperation with the Department of Health and Human Services at San Diego State University and the World Health Organization. SafetyLit has always had a broad focus that covers unintentional injuries and self-harm as well as interpersonal violence.

Although VioLit and SafetyLit have always had some overlap in contents, each has violence-related material that was not in the other. Further, the VioLit records contain the added value of keywords and index terms that enhance searching. Also, many VioLit records have expanded abstracts with useful commentary added by CSPV staff. When we found overlapping items, the VioLit expanded summaries and keywords were added to the SafetyLit records. The VioLit keyword system terms have been added to the SafetyLit thesaurus.

Many libraries continue to include VioLit among their links to free bibliographic databases. These VioLit links are forwarded to the UC Boulder, Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence homepage. Although a link to the SafetyLit database may be found there, we recommend that libraries add a direct link to the SafetyLit database at http://www.safetylit.org/search

See the announcement on the Special Libraries Association Social Science Division website:
http://socialscience.sla.org/2013/11/safetylit-and-violit-announce-partnership/