Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Dialog Finds A New Home., Carol Tenopir

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

THE BIGGEST INDUSTRY NEWS this summer was the announcement that proQuest had acquired Dialog from Thomson Reuters. Dialog was beginning to look like an unwelcome stepchild as new strategies by Thomson Reuters were moving the firm away from traditional databases and library markets. ProQuest, by contrast, has a solid foundation in both areas and has been aggressively building with new acquisitions and products.

Still, the news came as a surprise to most of us, as the change happened remarkably fast--rarely is a major acquisition rumored, announced, and completed all within a month.

Dialog, the grandfather of online database systems that …

Trademark Searching Tools And Strategies: Questions For The New Millennium, Jon R. Cavicchi

Law Faculty Scholarship

The intent of this discussion is to raise questions about trademark searching which will be discussed in future issues of IDEA. I will lead you through the questions raised by my journey through primarily legal literature in treatises and periodicals on the Lexis and Westlaw platforms.

Spying On Search Strategies, Carol Tenopir

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

Only the most dedicated super-searchers are motivated to learn and control command systems, like DialogClassic, that rely on the user to input complex search strategies. Infrequent searchers and most end users choose interfaces that do some of the work for them and make the search process appear easy. However, the easier a good interface seems to be, the more complex the system underlying it must be. Google is popular not only because of its simple dialog-box interface but because users are typically satisfied with their results. This article compares and contrasts different ways to get search results and focuses on …

Database For Information Professionals, Carol Tenopir

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Dialog version of ISTA was part of Dialog's full-text linking program, and ISTA indexers include URLs in ISTA records when they have them. ISTA's Donald Hawkins explains that "many users don't have accounts with Dialog. ITI cannot offer One-stop shopping.' EBSCO, on the other hand, has a wealth of resources and a large complement of databases...[including] a large collection of full text, which it hosts and has rights to."

Disappearing Databases, Carol Tenopir

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT, September 30, 2002, 19 databases disappeared without a trace from the Dialog online system. The reason? CSA (Cambridge Scientific Abstracts) and Dialog had failed to reach a renewal agreement. On October 1, Dialog searchers received a message "file does not exist" when they entered a CSA file number. A logon message listed the file numbers that were removed. (Admittedly, a notice was sent to subscribers, and a logon warning message ran for a couple of weeks prior to October 1.) This is just the latest case in a disturbing trend of disappearing databases.

Why I Still Teach Dialog, Carol Tenopir

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

A GROUP OF SPECIAL librarians who run information services for multinational corporations recently told me what they looked for in new MLS graduates. They want people who feel comfortable learning and searching multiple online systems, teaching end users, and choosing the best resources.

Several in the group complained that, although their new hires were excellent web searchers and web page designers, they did not have enough experience with fee-based online services. One manager said she looks to MLS graduates for less common attributes; she wants people who understand how information systems are structured, can search fee-based systems with confidence, and …

The Evolving Database Marketplace, Jeff Barry, Carol Tenopir

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

Initially propelled by online searching and CD-ROM networking, and now given added momentum by the Internet, electronic reference resources are changing the way librarians provide reference service. Library users are accessing traditional citation and abstract databases with greater ease and efficacy than before, thanks to more consistent and friendlier interfaces and the integration of full text and graphics.

How fundamental are the changes to library reference services? According to LJ's 1996 Reference Survey, librarians estimate that in the next three years their CD-ROM reference sources will grow by 51 percent and their online sources by 43 percent, vs. fairly …

Online’83 In Chicago, Carol Tenopir

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

Presents news briefs concerning online databases in the U.S. as of December 15, 1983. DIALOG's effort to add more databases; Full text databases of BRS; Expansion of the information services products of SDC.