eReviews

Springer Science+Business Media

www.springer.com

CONTENT SpringerImages is a collection of 1.8 million-plus medical, scientific, and technical images online, including graphs, histograms, photographs, tables, and more. Images are drawn from SpringerLink and images.MD, covering the following subjects: Biomedicine, Chemistry, Computer Science, Economics/Management Sciences, Education, Engineering, Environment, Geography, Geosciences, Humanities/Arts, Life Sciences, Material Science, Mathematics, Medicine & Public Health, Pharmacy, Physics, Psychology, and the Social Sciences. Subject collections are browsable and searchable; the simple search is by captions or keywords, while advanced search options let you search by captions, keywords, subject, DOI, source publication, provider, institution, author, date, and image type.

The system lets you save image searches, create libraries of images, add keywords to an image, and export images to PowerPoint or PDF files. Thumbnails of many images can be viewed for free, and the system allows for IP authentication and provides counter statistics. It's updated continuously, with images added as they are published.

USABILITY The screen opens with a top search bar that includes links to Home, About, For Libraries, Contact Us, Help, My Images, My Account, and Log Out. Beneath this tool bar is a simple search box, followed by a drop-down menu to choose Search Caption or Search All Text. Following this line is a toggle to Show Advanced Options, which opens up the Advanced Search window. At the bottom of this window is a check box to "Search only images to which I have access (free images and subscription)," a logical feature given that some images are free and that there are two options for subscribing to this file (see PRICING, below).

Back at the main screen, left column, is a list showing the total images in the collection (1,832,871 at this writing), the number of free images (37,341 at this writing), and the number of images in the Subjects to which your institution is subscribed (at this writing, ranging from 505,508 Medicine and Public Health images to 2,273 images for Pharmacy). By clicking on a subject, you can search within just that subject.

To the right of that column of subjects are a number of Featured Images from the collection. At this writing, featured images included "Response surface with contour plot (3D) showing the effects of core layer proportion (x1) and core layer resin content (x2) on the response of MOR," "a SEM image of double typical 3D flower-like hierarchical NiO architectures; b-c the corresponding enlarged SEM images of the area marked with a red rectangle. Inset c is a high-magnification TEM image of a sheet; d EDS result of the as-obtained -Ni(OH)2 samples calcined at 500 °C for 4 h. Inset of d shows SAED pattern of the NiO nanosheet," and a "Diagrammatic representation of hepatitis B virion." Heady stuff, indeed.

I tried accessing this file on a PC via both Internet Explorer (IE) and Mozilla Firefox, and on a Mac via both Firefox and Safari. It worked on all of them, but the displays were markedly different: the screen was clean and easy to read on the PC via IE, but on Firefox with the PC there was overlapping of text, links, and search boxes that made it difficult to navigate. I got similar results on the Mac: via Safari the screen was clean and easy to read, but with Mac Firefox spacing was so off kilter that the file was hard to use.

I started out slowly, clicking the Humanities/Arts subject to search within the 5,257 images there. One featured image was an "Argument diagram for the clock and gun case," whose source was "Evaluating Corroborative Evidence," by Douglas Walton and Chris Reed, Argumentation, Vol. 22, Issue 4, published 10/24/2008. Hmmm. What would a search find? I did a search within Humanities/Arts for "intuition" and got three results, the first of which was for an "Exemplary coincidence list to be analyzed by Boolean methodologies," drawn from the article, "The Causal Chain Problem," by Michael Baumgartner, Erkenntnis, Vol. 69, Issue 2, published 1/9/2008, a paper which "addresses a problem that arises when it comes to inferring deterministic causal chains from pertinent empirical data. It will be shown that to every deterministic chain there exists an empirically equivalent common cause structure."

So next I tried an Advanced Search. As I typed "Diabetes," the system brought up a subject list that was much more detailed than the 18 subject headings listed among the collection. As it turned out, Diabetes is a subject in the system, so I clicked it into the search box and then easily limited my search to images published from January 2009 to December 2009. I got two results: "Cell cycle analysis of GH3 cells following SAHA treatment" and "SAHA increases apoptotic cell death in GH3 cells."

PRICING You can subscribe in two ways: to the entire collection or to the Medical and Life Sciences collection only. Costs to individuals are $595 and $395, respectively, for a one-year subscription. Institutional pricing varies based on FTE and research intensity and starts at under $5000 in the United States.

BOTTOM LINE The material here is scholarly and authoritative and rates a ten. The quality of the images themselves is also excellent. The access interface is overall okay, although the difficulties experienced with various browsers cause me to take a point off. Another point comes off for the not-so-affordable price. That makes the overall rating a strong eight.

END USERS Recommended to research and special libraries supporting Ph.D. and professional research in the sciences and lacking alternate access to the material in the collection.