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Issues in Science and Technology
Librarianship |
Winter 2004 |
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DOI:10.5062/F4QV3JHQ |
URLs in this document have been updated. Links enclosed in {curly brackets} have been changed. If a replacement link was located, the new URL was added and the link is active; if a new site could not be identified, the broken link was removed. |
InfoSci-Online, from Idea Group Inc., provides full text access to IGI's print journals, books, and proceedings on the subject of information science, technology and management. It includes literature from the publisher's three imprints: Idea Group Publishing, Information Science Publishing, and IRM Press.
InfoSci-Online advertises its inclusion of journals, books, proceedings, and teaching cases. Although this product includes full text of IGI's currently published 8 quarterly journals, 1 annual, and 1 semi-annual newsletter, the heart of the product is the books. The journals, although valuable, are not enough to fully cover any topic in depth. It should be noted that IGI lists another 14 quarterly journals that it will begin publishing in January, 2005. Libraries that maintain a list of direct links to ejournals will be frustrated by the search-only access.
The books are the main attraction this product. 189 titles are included, covering topics in all areas of information science, from telecommunications to E-learning to management. The database is updated monthly, and books are added to the database before they go to print. IGI promises to add approximately 1300 additional book chapters per year. Currency of the content is quite good, with all books published 2000 through 2004. Don't look for software manuals here. Many of the titles are theoretical, in contrast to the computer-manual style of the majority of books in Books24X7 or Safari. The titles are designed for professionals, rather than laymen, and are appropriate for university-level collections.
Although the product includes proceedings published by IGI, these papers originate from only 4 meetings. Perhaps this will be an area of expansion in the future.
InfoSci-Online includes 'Teaching Cases'. These are case studies drawn from book and journal content already covered by the database, so they do not represent additional material. They are, however, handily set apart to be easily searched and found. Just as the products name for them implies, these 'teaching cases' may be most useful as real-world examples that can be brought into the information science classroom.
Overall the interface is easy and fairly obvious. Help screens are useful and, for the most part, written with admirable clarity. Comparing the interface with that of other e-book products, the software is much easier to use than that of netLibrary or Books24x7. On the other hand, both of these other products allow searching within the full text.
The greatest limitation of this product is that it only includes the output of a single publisher. In that sense it can reasonably serve as a supplement, rather than a replacement for other technical e-book products, such as Books24x7, or O'Reilly Books' Safari product. Books are delivered on the chapter basis, instead of as complete books. This doesn't fit the traditional model, which many libraries still like to deliver, and makes it difficult to link directly to titles from a library's online catalog. Although it is not possible to link to a full book, you can search by source and get lists of chapters or contents, so reading the entire book, beginning-to-end, is possible, if a bit awkward. A plus to the chapter-at-a-time search is that it allows instructors to easily build course reading lists.
InfoSci-Online is available from Idea Group, Inc. at {http://www.infosci-online.com}.
IP addressing and use of proxies are supported.
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