E-Views and Reviews: 'C'; Is for Content

By Cheryl LaGuardia -- Library Journal, 06/01/2006

Researchers in Jewish history and genealogy should check out Jewish Data Online (www.jewishdata.com), an online resource of over 250,000 indexed records, including images of Declaration of Intention documents and Jewish tombstones from various locations. The cost for individual libraries is $500/year; consortial per library costs are lower.

Get More Than You Pay For Free access is now available to EBSCO’s Teacher Reference Center™ (InfoTech, LJ 5/15/06), an index of 260-plus titles from popular teacher and administration trade journals, periodicals, and books covering assessment, curriculum development, instructional media, literacy standards, and more. Try it out at www.epnet.com. I guarantee surprises.

Quote of the Week “One of the major issues impacting [our] industry is the increased use of the open web versus authoritative databases. Search engines skim the thinnest layers of information; most have no access to the 'deep web.’ Our databases provide content that is accurate, thorough, and relevant to the topic being searched.... Widespread use of the open web forces libraries to remain relevant in a world that relies heavily on search engines. AccessMyLibrary.com allows searchers browsing search engines such as Google to connect directly with the information housed in their library. Once they find what they’re looking for on the engine’s results page, they can access it through AccessMyLibrary.com 24/7 from anywhere.”—Gordon Macomber, President, Thomson Gale

C19: The Nineteenth Century Index
ProQuest Information and Learning; proquest.com

C19: The Nineteenth Century Index offers content from seven different ProQuest and Chadwyck-Healey electronic collections, including American Periodicals Series Online; House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, 1801–1900; Nineteenth Century Microfiche Project; Nineteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue (NSTC); Palmer’s Index to The Times, 1790–1905; Periodicals Index Online (formerly PCI); and Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals. You can get live links to full text from citations when your library owns or subscribes to a pertinent Chadwyck-Healey database.

The first release contains over 11 million citations for books, periodicals, newspapers, and official government publications and offers the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals items online for the first time. The full period covered is 1770–1919, with material continually being added.

How Does It Work? The main screen lets you perform an immediate Quick Search and gives access to the Advanced Search area, where you can search by keyword, document title keyword, author, periodical title, and date. Searchers may choose to search all the collections at once, by item type (e.g., books, periodicals), or individually (e.g., the NSTC only). From this main screen you can also go into My Archive, where saved searches and selected records between sessions using a password are stored.

Can You and Your Patrons Use It? A Quick Search for “measles” garnered 608 items: 41 books, 451 periodical records, two official publications, and 114 newspaper records. Emailing these turned out to be laborious: the records to be emailed must be marked by going through the four different collections and sending each separately. And to make the process even more cumbersome, you can only send a maximum of 50 records at a time.

Emailing a slew of records needs to be made easier in the next release, since it’s an increasingly desirable means of collecting citations for later use. But the material itself is first rate, ranging from popular to very scholarly, and each record clearly denotes its collection source.

A search for “Jack the Ripper” was a little disappointing, yielding only 33 results, while the slightly more ambitious search for “Crimean war” and “nursing” yielded just two items: a book by Florence Nightingale and a journal article on practical obstetric nursing. Curious.

Just How Good Is It? The content is extraordinary, not surprising given the sources collected here. But the searching is not as powerful as one would hope, and the system can be quixotically slow. At present, this rates a 9.

What’s the Cost? Depending upon the size and type of institution and relevant ProQuest 19th-century holdings, purchase pricing ranges from $10,000 to $42,000, while annual subscription pricing ranges from $3500 to $8000.

The Bottom Line C19: The Nineteenth Century Index offers a wealth of high-quality material, but it makes no sense to pay high annual fees for something your library may already own in other formats. ProQuest has the opportunity to come up with some breakthrough licensing with this resource and lead the way into the next generation of aggregated superfiles. Let’s hope the company makes the most of it.