Database News for December 2004

Bowker's Books in Print offers more than 5 million current and forthcoming book, audio book, and video titles. This new version allows you to search or browse through criteria such as Author/Contributor, Awards,
Publisher, Reviewing Source, Series Title, Subject, or Title. Books in Print + Reviews also offers special areas for children's books, fiction, and forthcoming titles. Users can create "BIP alerts" to be notified of new titles matching their search criteria. Reviewing sources include Booklist, Choice, Library Journal, and the New York Times Book Review. Also offers bestseller lists from 1998 to the present.

The popular search engine Google has entered into agreements with several scholarly publishers and library organizations to bring new research tools to scholars. Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/) is a beta test search engine that retrieves journal articles, abstracts, conference papers, technical reports, and book records from the union library catalog, WorldCat. Journals indexed include the 29 partner publishers participating in the CrossRef consortium, such as Blackwell, Wiley, Springer, and the American Chemical Society. Google Scholar is also adding "Cited reference" searching in some instances, allowing you to retrieve other items that have cite the current article or book.

Because Google Scholar is a test service, specific details on content are not forthcoming. You can read more about this service on the Google FAQ page. Advanced searching is not yet available, but you can use Google command syntax such as author:sears and "extraterrestrial life."

One of the most useful features of Google Scholar is the ability to retrieve records from the gigantic union catalog, WorldCat. WorldCat contains more than 50 million records of books and other materials from more than 35,000 participating libraries. Google Scholar is collaborating with OCLC to indexes a portion of the full database in this "OpenWorldCat" experiment. When you conduct a search for a book, you will be offered the opportunity to locate the book in a library.

You will then be taken to a catalog record for that book; if you enter your zip code, you will see libraries in the area that own the book. If you are on campus, you will have the option of viewing the full record in WorldCat, looking un the book in the local library catalog, InfoLinks, or requesting books that we do not own on the ILLiad ILL system.

In the regular Google search engine, you can always add "site:worldcatlibraries.org" to search available WorldCat records.

For journal articles, Google Scholar may retrieve only a citation and abstract, or you may not be allowed to retrieve available full text. Access to the full text of articles will depend on whether or not the Libraries subscribe to a particular journal title and year as well as whether or not you are using a computer on or off campus. Be sure to check citations under journal title in InfoLinks to determine whether or not the Libraries own that title and year.

Researchers wishing to do comprehensive searching will still need to consult the Libraries' many subscription databases for more precise retrieval of the scholarly literature in their field.

The Libraries are please to add two new important research collections, Patrologia Latina and Acta Sanctorum. The Patrologia Latina Database is an electronic version of the first edition of Jacques-Paul Migne's Patrologia Latina, published between 1844 and 1865. The Patrologia Latina comprises the works of the Church Fathers from Tertullian in 200 AD to the death of Pope Innocent III in 1216.

The Acta Sanctorum Database is an electronic version of the complete printed text of Acta Sanctorum, from the edition published in sixty-eight volumes by the Societé des Bollandistes in Antwerp and Brussels. It is a collection of documents examining the lives of saints, organized according to each saint's feast day, and runs from the two January volumes published in 1643 to the Propylaeum to December published in 1940.

Users can search across both these corpora for words or phrases revealing important connections in philosophical thought and intellectual history. In addition, many of these texts have not previously been available in the Libraries so that these databases provide instant access to important primary source texts. Both databases include access to Jan Frederik Niermeyer's Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus, a dictionary of medieval Latin.

CAS (Chemical Abstracts Service) has released an updated version of its SciFinder Scholar software for Windows computers - Scholar 2004 Edition. The new version of SciFinder Scholar provides improved scrolling capabilities, a toolbar for use with Microsoft Internet Explorer and many feature enhancements. Visit our Scifinder software page for information on downloading and installing this update.