Title:Online Resources for You

From: News & Notes from Walther Library, 1998-99 School Year, Issue #6 (February 1999)

Online Resources for You

FROM THE LIBRARY'S HOME PAGE ON THE WEB, YOU CAN ACCESS MANY USEFUL AND RELEVANT ONLINE RESOURCES.

If you feel overwhelmed by the amount of information available on the Internet, Walther Library provides a number of starting points from its home page on the World Wide Web (http://www.ctsfw.edu/library/) to help you. Since there is even more information there than we can discuss in the column this month (but you can browse at your leisure), our focus is on what is available through the PALNI SiteSearch.

To get to SiteSearch, follow the links from "Look for Books & Articles in the Library" to "PALNI SiteSearch for Netscape and IE 4.0" to "Click here to start." This brings you to the database selection screen. Once you choose one of the available data-bases, you can search the contents of that database. The advantage of SiteSearch is that the interface for all databases is the same; once you have learned to use one database, you can easily use any of them.

WorldCat, the last database in the list, is OCLC's database containing almost forty million items owned by thousands of libraries around the globe. You can find in this data-base books, CDs, journals, computer files, videos, maps, musical scores, films-anything which libraries have cataloged. (See story from last month for more information on WorldCat.)

What you won't find in WorldCat is the individual articles from journals. For those, you need to choose the ArticleFirst database. ArticleFirst contains citations that describe items listed on the table of contents pages of approximately 12,600 journals in science, technology, medicine, social science, business, the humanities, and popular culture. Each record describes one article, news story, letter, or other item.

As you review the subject areas listed above that are found in ArticleFirst, you probably notice that religion and theology is not prominent (except as a part of the humanities). To find articles in primarily theological journals, choose the ATLA Religion Data-base. Here you have access to the same material as that found on the CD-ROM that you have perhaps used in the library. The ATLA Religion Database contains over one million citations from 1,400 inter-national journals (of which 600 are currently indexed) and 14,000 multi-author works in and related to the field of religion.

If wading through a large number of hits from an Internet search engine frustrates you-when many of those hits are of questionable use-you will want to try the NetFirst database. This database contains citations, complete with summary descriptions and subject headings, describing high-quality Internet-accessible resources suitable for a wide range of interests and age groups. The records returned by a search contain hot links to connect users to resources of interest.

For educational resources, you can try ERIC. The Educational Resources Information Center has represented the most complete bibliography of educational materials available since 1966. The ERIC database is a guide to published and unpublished sources on thousands of educational topics, with information from RIE (Resources in Education) and CIJE (Current Index to Journals in Education). CIJE covers over 980 journals.

Finally, if you like reading texts online, try MasterFile FullText 1500. This file indexes over 3,100 general interest, business, health, and multi-cultural journals, with the full text searchable (and retrievable) for 1,500 general interest journals.

Previous Article  |  Newsletter Index  |  Next Article