A c t i o n f o r L i b r a r i e s — S e p t e m b e r 2 0 0 5

In Reference...

Edited by Brandie Baumann
Free Resources from Alexander Street Press
A new free resource is available from Alexander Street Press In the First Person: Index to Letters, Diaries, Oral Histories, and Other Personal Narratives. Find it at www.inthefirstperson.com/. In the First Person is a library index that lets users perform in-depth field and keyword searches across all letters, diaries, oral histories, memoirs and autobiographies within scholarly materials that are freely available on the Web and Alexander Street Press databases. With a single search, users can access thousands of personal narratives in English from archives and repositories. The search returns citation information and links to full text, audio and video whenever available. It will be updated quarterly.

The first release of In the First Person database indexes more than 2,500 collections of oral history from around the world. With upcoming releases, the index will broaden to cover other formats (letters, diaries, autobiographies and so forth) and the proprietary content in the Alexander Street Press collections. By the end of 2005, the index will point to 350,000 pages of full text and 3,500 collections. (For subscribers to Alexander Street Press databases that contain first-person content indexed by the In the First Person database, the citations will link to the full text.)

Sage Publications Provides Per-Article Access
Sage Publications and OCLC have agreed to provide per-article access to Sage Publications' 300-plus titles that are currently available through the OCLC FirstSearch Electronic Collections Online database, giving users per-article access to more than 3,900 titles. Subscribers can turn on access to these journals by logging on to the FirstSearch Admin module, selecting the resource sharing tab and then selecting the per article purchase tab. For a list of journals and access information, see www.oclc.org/electroniccollections/options/pau/default.htm. For questions about the database, subscriptions and pricing, please contact BCR's Heather Clark (hclark@bcr.org) or Karen Graham (kgraham@bcr.org).

Wilson Education Index Retrospective Available
H. W. Wilson has published the new Education Index Retrospective 1929-1983 database, providing more than 50 years of cover-to-cover indexing for an international range of English-language periodicals and yearbooks. The database provides:

Detailed, cover-to-cover indexing of some 500 periodicals, going back as far as 1929.
Citations for nearly one million articles, including book reviews.
Indexing from 300 printed cumulations.

Ovid Database News
The International Bibliography of Social Sciences (IBSS) has been added to the family of Ovid databases. A comprehensive source of information for academic institutions, IBSS reviews more than 2,700 journals and 3,000 books. Core subjects include economics, political science, sociology and anthropology. Development studies, geography and environmental studies and media and communication are included as cross-disciplinary subjects.

Inspec Archive is now live on Ovid. Inspec Archive is the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) bibliographic record, providing electronic access to the printed Science Abstracts journals. The archive complements the Inspec database and is available as a one-time purchase or lease. Users will find they can save search time and library shelving costs, as well.

The database includes coverage of the years 1989 to 1968, with original literature from Einstein, Max Planck and others and combined files of more than 873,700 records giving access to scientific and technical literature from 1898 to the present.

For more information on Wilson or Ovid databases, contact Karen Graham (kgraham@bcr.org) at BCR.

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