December 1997
Newsletter #29
 

Cooperative Purchases Benefit Faculty and Student Research

Library Donors Recognized

Classrooms Renovated with Advanced Educational Technology

New Reserve Procedure

Gift Enhances Australian Collection

New Library Databases

ProQuest Direct: Full-Text Articles Online

More Space for a Growing Collection

New Furniture for Science Library
Completes Renovation

UMI's ProQuest Direct databases may well be the model for periodical and journal indexes in the next millennium.  UMI has paired their existing, excellent indexes, with online desktop access to summaries of articles from over 5,000 publications, with many in full text or full image format.  To use ProQuest Direct, all you need is access to the Web using a computer on campus. Lauinger Library, in cooperation with the E.B. Williams Law Library, acquired two databases in the Proquest Direct family beginning in the Fall 1997. 

Periodical Abstracts Research II provides abstracts and indexing for 1,800 periodicals in the social sciences, the humanities, general sciences, business and general interest.  Title coverage includes magazines like Sports Illustrated and National Geographic; academic journals such as the American Journal of Psychology, Columbia Journalism Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education; and business publications like Fortune and Forbes. Also included are articles from the most recent six months of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Coverage for many titles begins in 1986.

Since 1971, ABI/INFORM has been an essential resource tool for business researchers.  The database provides in-depth coverage of business conditions, trends, corporate strategies and tactics, management techniques, product information, and much more. ABI/INFORM features full bibliographic citations, and 25 to 150 word abstracts so researchers can quickly identifyrelevant material. ABI/INFORM Global includes more than 1,400 current business, management, industry, academic, and trade publications.   ABI/INFORM Global also provides international business coverage, with more than 350 international English-language titles included in the database.

Searching ProQuest Direct is easy.  Use the operators AND, AND NOT, OR, with words or phrases that describes your research topic.  For example, education AND Internet.  If you have a question, click on the question mark in the upper right corner and ProQuest Direct gives you "context-sensitive" help, automatically offering assistance specific to the screen you're on.  The Search Assistant can also help you fully use the capabilities of ProQuest Direct.  It provides search fields, operators, and predefined date restrictions that you can use to refine your search. Search fields include: author, title, publication date, geographic area, and SIC codes.

In addition to the well-known quality of the indexing and sources included in these databases, UMI provides online desktop access to the full-text and/or the full-image of over half of the articles included in both databases.  Your search results will be displayed as a table which indicates the availability of an abstract, text only, page image, and text plus graphics formats foreach item retrieved by your search.  If you are only interested in finding articles for which full text is available online, click on the "retrieve only full text" option.  The ProQuest Direct databases are excellent, easy-to-use indexes for 5,000 high quality source  publications which also provide immediate access to thousands of indexed articles.  Doing your research is now easier than ever.