E-Views and Reviews: Four-Star Accommodations

YOUR FEEDBACK Mark Funk, head of collection development at the Weill Cornell Medical Library, New York, responds to the December column item “Buy it once, buy it twice” by proposing an alternate scheme for pricing of online products: “Charge a library two, three, or four times the cost of the print version for online access. However, after that initial purchase, charge the library a minimal annual maintenance fee for continuing access. Then watch libraries purchase more and more electronic books. Until this happens, high price barriers will keep all but the most flush libraries away.” Reactions to Mark's plan?

QUOTE OF THE WEEK “Our main goal is to ensure that our e-resources reflect the same reliability and quality we've put into products for over 100 years. Customers are pleased with the powerful new WilsonWeb and with enhancements introduced in response to user feedback. The bedrock of our products continues to be Wilson precision indexing and abstracting still done by in-house librarians and subject specialists. While continuing to fulfill our mission to deliver full-text content, Wilson's future plans call for an expansion of our role as the premier content identification option with new products such as Play Index and Reference Shelf.”—Eileen Sutter, Director of Marketing, & Ron Miller, Director of Product Management, H.W. Wilson

Hospitality and Tourism Index with Full Text
EBSCO; www.ebsco.com

This online file indexes the scholarly literature and industry news within the fields of hospitality and tourism, covering subjects like the culinary arts, food and beverage management, hospitality law, hotel management, market trends, and much more. It presently comprises more than 500,000 records from over 500 journals ranging as far back as 1965 and collected from the Hospitality database (formerly produced by Cornell University); Lodging, Restaurant, and Tourism Index (formerly produced by Purdue University); and Articles in Hospitality and Tourism (formerly produced by the University of Surrey and Oxford Brookes). Evidently, the file is international in scope, with material gathered from across the globe. Full text (much of it in full-color PDF format) is provided for over 200 journals.

How Does It Work? The EBSCOhost interface is a favorite of mine, and, more important, of the researchers with whom I work. Basic Search, with a simple Find box, is easy to use yet powerful, as is Advanced Search (which allows limiting to Full Text, dates, authors, and particular publications). Advanced search enables researchers to use Expanders to search for related words within the full text, as well as Boolean operators. It is easy to print, email, and download results; in fact, everything about this interface is easy and intuitive.

Can You and Your Patrons Use It? My first Basic search, for “pastry chefs,” found 107 articles, 41 in full text. Many focused on individual chefs, but others were feature articles, for example, “Making Ends Meet,” from the March 1, 2005 issue of Restaurant Business, whose header read, “Dessert is a painless and very pleasurable way to get more fruit on the menu—and into customers' mouths.” The article also included five recipes for fruit-based desserts, as well as a Menu Sampler of dessert offerings at restaurants across the United States, along with their prices.

Next I searched for “plating” and found 99 articles, 24 of which contained full text. But beware those full-color PDFs. The list's first article on the Razzzburger (“a ring of raspberries on white-chocolate ganache sandwiched between rose-water-scented almond macaroons”) included a full-color photograph of the dessert, artistically plated in all its high-calorie glory (sigh!).

There is also abundant scholarly material to be found here. In that same “plating” search I located “Survival and Recovery of Listeria monocytogenes on Ready-To-Eat Meats Inoculated with a Dessicated and Nutritionally Depleted Dustlike Vector” from the June 2003 issue of Journal of Food Protection. A search for “hotel liabilities” located 555 articles ranging across the topics of negligence, insurance, hallway attacks, bathtub falls, harassment, security, snow removal, smelly rooms, and many more areas of concern to those in the business. Researchers will find specific searchable fields (e.g., Geographic Terms, Reviews and Products, People) particularly useful.

Just How Good Is It? Based on the content, indexing, and utility to its audience, Hospitality and Tourism Index rates a 9.8. If there were more full text available, it would be a 10.

What's It Going to Cost? Depending on variable factors (e.g., number of participating sites, FTE, etc.), the price ranges from $2400 to $5800 per site.

The Bottom Line An essential acquisition for academic libraries serving students and other researchers in hospitality and tourism, as well as for large public libraries and special libraries serving scholars in these areas.