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

The libraries on the three Georgetown University campuses established stronger cooperative relationships among themselves to better husband library materials budgets, and to take advantage of new technological opportunities. 

The first joint purchase by the Lauinger Library, the Dahlgren Medical Library and the Law Center's E.B. Williams Library was Britannica Online in the summer of 1996. Britannica Online offered a recognized product with excellent quality control, and allowed campus-wide access to the full text of the Encyclopedia Britannica through the Web. Britannica Online, like our other purchased Web products, received full cataloging and can be found through GEORGE, the online catalog. 

Next, Academic Press' Project Ideal gave the Georgetown campuses online access to over 178 journal titles in the physical sciences, biological sciences, mathematics, business, medicine and the social sciences. In the Spring of 1997, librarians from the Law Library and the Lauinger Library jointly evaluated a number of full text databases and selected UMI's Proquest Direct service. This service includes ABI/Inform Global edition, and Periodicals Abstracts Research II. ABI/Inform Global edition indexes 1,457 business, industry and management titles of which more than 600 are available in either full-image or full-text.  Periodicals Abstracts Research II covers 1,817 periodical titles  in the  social sciences, the humanities, general sciences, business and general interest. Almost half of the titles indexed in Periodicals Abstracts Research II are available online in full-text or full-image. The subscription was begun in September 1997.  For a fuller description see "ProQuest Direct:  Full Text Articles Online."

Other recent collaborative purchases include World News Connection, the online replacement for FBIS reports, and Contemporary Women's Issues. The Libraries have also purchased PolicyFile, CIAO - Columbia International Affairs Online, and electronic journals from Project Muse, and JSTOR with access for all three campuses.  Lauinger and the Dahlgren Medical Library continue to share the costs of the Science Citation Index with Abstracts as well as networking costs for Biological Abstracts and Psychological Abstracts.  For fuller descriptions of many of these databases see the related article, "New Library Databases" on page 4 of this issue of the Faculty/Library Newsletter. 

Librarians from Lauinger Library and the Law Center are currently evaluating the Economist Intelligence Unit's Country Reports; Country Risk Report; Country Forecasts; Newsletters and Investment; and Licensing and Trade files in both Web and CD-ROM versions for possible cooperative purchase in the near future. 

The University Libraries find that the cooperative purchasing of electronic databases of common interest is beneficial to faculty, student, and staff research while maximizing the resources the libraries can make available within their budgets.