Title:Express Terminals at the Library

Express Terminals in the Library

FOUR EXPRESS TERMINALS ARE CONVENIENTLY LOCATED FOR RAPID ACCESS TO THE LIBRARY'S COLLECTIONS

In order to give you easy access to all that the library has to offer, we have provided four express terminals for your use. These four terminals are located just west of the main stairwell. From this central location, you can move to the journal storage behind you, to the refer-ence books on the floor around you, or go up or down the stairs for the circulating books.

Although we call these the "express terminals," they are actually PC workstations that replace the Digital Equip-ment Corporation "dumb terminals" which you used in the past to access the library's holdings. Using a termi-nal emulation program, you access the PALNI (Private Academic Library Network of Indiana) catalog in the same manner in which you used the DEC terminals.

But because these are now PC workstations, we can offer you more on each station. From each of the express terminals, you have access to PALNI SiteSearch, which opens up the world of libraries and information outside of Concordia Theological Seminary. SiteSearch gives you access from one central location to a variety of databases.

One set of databases is funded by the state of Indiana ("your tax dollars at work"). These databases are intended not only for seminarians, but also for their entire families. There are databases here designed for all educational levels, from primary school to higher education. Some of the databases even include full-text articles. This will save you some effort, but probably not much for serious theological research, since most theological journals are not yet in full text.

SiteSearch also includes several databases paid for through our PALNI membership. Chief among these is WorldCat, a database of about 40 million bibliographic records, the bibliographic universe outside our own walls. NetFirst is another valuable database-an index to quality sites on the World Wide Web, indexed in the same manner as books.

Finally, there are two databases purchased for your use by Concordia Theological Seminary. The ATLA Religion Database is available with the same interface as that used for all other searches on SiteSearch. Books in Print allows you access to an electronic list of resources currently available from publishers.

All of the databases on SiteSearch are also available to you from your home. Just follow the link from the library's home page on the World Wide Web and have the fourteen-digit number on your ID at hand.

In addition to accessing the PALNI catalog and PALNI SiteSearch, each of the four express terminals has (or will shortly have) access to a CD-ROM database. From Express 1, you can access Religious and Theological Abstracts; from Express 2, you can access New Testament Abstracts; from Express 3, you can access Old Testament Abstracts; from Express 4, you can access the ATLA Religion Database (on CD-ROM).

Finally, why do we call these the "express terminals"? Because they are designed for rapid look-up of citations to books and articles, for quick access to the library's holdings. We ask that you use the library workstations (see next article) we have provided for any other work, such as word processing, e-mail access, and Web surfing.

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