Monday, November 20, 2006

AzLA conference notes: Electronic Databases

New databases, which we have seen on our databases page, are available through ASLPR, MCLD, and Pima County Public Library. These databases are now available to the patrons and cardholders of every public library statewide. This is funded in part by a grant, which the state library will try to extend if the databases are well-used.

Some new features of these databases include:
EBSCO now has a Visual Search, which allows you to search for published images and photographs. You can access the Image Collection by going to the Basic Search tab, then selecting Images. Newspaper Source now has transcripts from radio and TV news.

Thomson-Gale offers a Power Search that searches across all the Gale databases. Legal Trac is a new database that offers indexing and some full-text articles from law journals, as well as coverage of federal and state laws. Health Reference Center Academic offers articles such as those found on PubMed in full text.

Grolier has Passport for older students. Popular Science includes background information for science experiments.

SIRS also has a portal to search across all their databases: see the Database Features tab. They offer a Citizenship product, Federal Government information, and Discoverer for younger students.

OCLC FirstSearch offers bilingual searching of Latin American journals in the humanities through Clase & Periodica.

WebFeat is also provided by the ASLPR/MCLD/PCPL consortium to all public libraries in Arizona. This aggregate search tool allows you to search across all the databases simultaneously. The Advanced Search feature allows you to set limits such as date range; you can also select several databases to focus the search on rather than searching them all. Each library’s website is responsible for building a link to WebFeat to allow “All-in-one” searching. (See the Cochise County Library for an example.) Some libraries have not yet been able to get this link working, however, including CPL.

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