A c t i o n f o r L i b r a r i e s — N o v e m b e r 2 0 0 2

BCR Tests New WilsonWeb Interface

By Ellen Fox

H.W. Wilson has released their new version of WilsonWeb, and it is a significant improvement.

From the library user's perspective, the natural language search capability should seem comfortably similar to the ask Jeeves style of searching that Internet users have come to expect. A search for "diabetes" and "what causes diabetes?" brought different result sets; however, the results were reasonable matches for each search. Users can search multiple databases and get a deduped result set. There are a variety of customizable display options; whether library users will be able to interpret those options remains to be seen. The context-sensitive help screens and the Infocenter screens are well-designed and easy to use. One drawback of the new interface having so many features is that the screen is a little crowded — hiding all unnecessary toolbars on the Web browser helps a bit here.

Librarians will appreciate the retention of the browse and thesaurus features from the old interface. SFX linking allows Wilson citations to link to full-text in any open-URL compliant database to which the library subscribes. Any full-text content contained in the Wilson databases is now completely searchable, which is a big step forward.

The Boolean search capabilities of the new search engine are really impressive. There are over 30 Boolean operators, including proximity, concept, relational, evidence and score operators. The search syntax is complicated and would take more than a day or so to learn, but the precision offered may be worth it to those library staff who consider themselves "super-searchers."

Wilson is also emphasizing the improvement in their statistics package, which we didn't have an opportunity to test. The enhancements include finer granularity of reports on session use, the ability to count the number of HTML vs. PDF full-text retrievals, journal usage reports, IP usage reports and better turnaway reports.

Overall the new WilsonWeb represents a genuine advance over the previous version, and Wilson has done a good job of retaining valuable features of the old version while adding functionality to the new version. You can try it for yourself by browsing to hwwilsonweb.com, choosing Now Preview on the right and then choosing Click Here to Preview the New WilsonWeb Next Generation Technology. For questions contact BCR's Rosario Garza (rgarza@bcr.org) or Karen Graham (kgraham@bcr.org).

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