E-Views and Reviews: One for the Anthropologists

By Cheryl LaGuardia -- Library Journal, 6/15/2006

SOMETHING IS ROTTEN in the State of Deep-Linking, and in the words of Paddy Chayefsky's Network, “We're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it anymore!” It is ridiculous that easy deep-linking to the full text of e-journal articles is not a standard service. A note to vendors: deep-linking is so pervasive a need, it should be a basic feature in all products.

FOR PSYCHIATRIC HELP Librarians serving mental health professionals will want to look at PsychiatryOnline.com, “a collection of key resources for mental health professionals centered around DSM-IV-TR.” The Librarian Resource Page (store.appi.org/librarians.aspx) is a model of what library-inclined vendors should be making available routinely on their sites. These folks get it.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK “In today's business world, effective search tools must...deliver only the relevant search results to employees at the point of need, helping them to organize information quickly. Companies that use these tools will no doubt achieve competitive advantage. Recognizing this, Factiva will...be introducing new search capabilities that will redefine how business professionals...understand information. The first in line is Search 2.0.... It helps users drill deeper into their search results so that they can...analyze information through data visualization and sorting capabilities. It not only answers the questions significantly faster, it answers the questions users didn't even know to ask.”—Alan Scott, Chief Marketing Officer, Factiva

AnthroSource
American Anthropological Association www.anthrosource.net

AnthroSource is a searchable electronic archive of 15 peer-reviewed American Anthropological Association (AAA) journals, including American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, and Medical Anthropology Quarterly. The site is updated when a new issue of a journal is printed, with the e-version usually available before the print publication. It also features access to the archival content in JSTOR for certain publications.

How Does It Work? You can browse Tables of Contents or abstracts or the full text of articles, which are accessible in two formats (PDF and PDF Plus, CrossRef enabled). You can also receive emailed Table of Contents alerts when new journal issues are available, as well as citation alerts for journals you specify. The system offers Simple Search, Advanced Search, and Saved Searches. The interface uses frames. Links to Home, Journals, Search, My Profile, Institutions, Help, and Contact Us are ever-present in the left-hand frame; a shortcut Quick Search column at screen right gives ready access to Simple searches or switching quickly into Advanced Search.

Can You and Your Patrons Use It? If you want to look at a particular issue of one of the journals, the system is easy to use. Click on Journals at screen left, choose the title and the issue you want, and get a listing of the contents with links to Citation, PDF, PDF Plus, and Reprints and Permissions (a nice touch). You can add this issue to your favorites, view citations, email them to a friend, view abstracts, and more. This is probably the way many anthropologists will work with the file.

If you want to search, however, things get a bit cloudier. A Simple Search for “marriage and Vietnam,” for example, yields 260 matches. A click on the PDF Plus link took me to a 20-page image file of the February 1996 issue of the journal Voices, where I couldn't find any reference to the topic. When I tried clicking Citation, a reiteration of the Citation for the issue of the journal appeared, with the same options except with the addition of View Table of Contents. I clicked that link and got exactly the same citation as I did clicking Citation.

I had better luck Simple searching for “george reisner,” locating citations referencing the eminent Egyptologist's work. The review I sought, however, was available only through JSTOR (it was from 1924). Without my institutional rights activated, I realized how maddening it would be to search here without full access to JSTOR, since much of the historical material in AnthroSource will only be available through it (most of the content here begins in 1997).

How Good Is It? I'm not a fan of PDF-based full-text files, so take that into account. But adding in the decidedly nonintuitive search result functions, along with the lack of reasonable depth without ancillary access through JSTOR, and the slowness and vagueness of a PDF result, the file gets a 7 at present.

What's the Cost? For M.A./Ph.D.-granting institutions, its annual price is $1030; for baccalaureate colleges and specialized institutions in developed countries, it's $703; for associate's colleges, law libraries, medical libraries, or developing countries, it's $322 for that same period. Public libraries should inquire at info@anthrosource.net.

The Bottom Line AnthroSource can serve as an online Table of Contents alerting service for faculty served by academic libraries, but those truly interested will be AAA members. The product is not configured to be an effective library resource; as such, it is not recommended.