Academic Matters

This was supposed to be a pair work but my partner only did a review for Literature Online. The other 2 databases that were evaluated were Emerald Fulltext and ProQuest Digital Dissertations. The comparison table is not shown fully here.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTIONA database is an accumulation of information that is stored over a certain period of time and it is accessible in a computer-readable format. A computer processes data for many years using different types of storage formats. The most cost-saving way of storing data is by using some form of magnetic disc, as it has the ability to keep large amount of data while enabling user fast access to any particular information.There are some databases that store information for purposes that are practical, for example, information that are collected for making statistical analysis such as the country census and textual data for information retrieval for example, technical or literary abstracts, and government statutory or other law and regulations.The amount of funding involved in setting up the database is large; therefore, it is expected for the information to remain useful in the long term. A database may cater to the various needs and different group of users. For example, Literature Online is used by a majority students and researchers who are involved in literary studies. On the other hand, Emerald Fulltext caters more for articles in the management area.The purpose of this paper is to compare the search capabilities of three different databases, namely, ProQuest Digital Dissertations, Emerald Fulltext and Literature Online. The evaluation is based on the interface and accessibility, search functions and capabilities and display and output. There is also comparison table to provide a clearer view of the differences between the three databases.CHAPTER 2 PROQUEST DIGITAL DISSERTATIONSInterfaceThe ProQuest Digital Dissertations (Dissertation Abstracts Online) is an electronic database of over 2 million entries compiled since 1861 of theses and dissertations from U.S. and Europe. The bare and simple user interface database covered publications from different parts of the world such as Australia, New Zealand & even Hong Kong. Apart from Digital Dissertations, the U.S-based ProQuest previously known as University Microfilms (UMI); has other database such as ProQuest Medical Library, ProQuest Historical Newspapers and ProQuest Historical Annual Reports.The online database provides basic and advance field-specific search interface. The basic search interface has three access points for search inputs with the option to narrow the results by the date of degree awarded and searching within the pull-down menu indexes, from a list of 11 given fields, such as author and subject. The search results are further refined by specifying another search within the results.The Advanced interface search enables the users to search for documents on the “Build Query Box” by adding terms on the access points and using the available 11 index fields of an article to refine search. The search history at the bottom of the advanced search interface enables combining the previous search terms with the current search.The “Help” section offers user help topics write-up, namely “Search Basics” and “Field-Specific Search Tips”. The “Help” section is available by clicking on “HELP” found on the top right hand side of the webpage. The online database does not provide a thesaurus service for the users.

AccessibilityThe ProQuest Digital Dissertations enables user access to bibliographic citations and abstracts, along with the author & university records, via the internet at http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/. The online database can be subscribed by libraries as well as University institutions however, individual user subscription is not allowed. Non-subscribers can only access the current one year record and have no access to citations and abstract beyond the one year. There is unlimited number of concurrent users.The database provides 24 page previews of the doctoral dissertation and master theses, from 1997 onwards, with the option of ordering online in print or PDF format; however, for theses and dissertations beyond 1997, registered users can only view the citations and abstracts from 1861. ProQuest Digital Dissertations is regularly updated with 60,000 dissertations and 12,000 theses annually.Users may navigate the database by the hyperlink tags on every page and may begin searching for dissertations and theses by browsing through the listed subjects via the “Browse” hypertext link or input the search terms into the search fields. The “Results List” hyperlink tag on the homepage displays the last search results. Search Functions & CapabilitiesThe Boolean operators use are ‘AND’, ‘OR’, and ‘NOT’. ‘AND’ operator is used between searchable terms to retrieved documents that contains all the terms listed. ‘OR’ operator is used to specify the retrieved documents to contain either search terms listed. ‘NOT’ operator, or ‘NOT’, retrieves documents after eliminating the second term of search terms but not the first term.The ProQuest Digital Dissertations supported nested search function by searching for terms in the inner most brackets and uses ‘?’ as a truncation at the end of a word to find the variations of a common root word. Phrase searching is available in both the basic and advanced search interface. The words of a phrase are separated by spaces to retrieve the documents that contain the exact phrase.Apart from Boolean operators, the online database uses ‘W/n’ and ‘PRE/n’ proximity operators to specify the sequence order of search terms. The ‘W/n’ operator searches for documents that contains the first term within n characters of the second term in any order. The ‘PRE/n’ operator retrieves documents that contains the first term within n characters to the left of the second term. The n in both operators specify as the number of characters between two terms. As with most databases, the ProQuest Digital Dissertations ignored ‘stop words’ to improve the search response time. The ‘stop words’ are common words that are not included in the database index.BrowsingThe “Browse” function, below the search hyperlink bar at the homepage Proquest Digital Dissertations enables the user to view the articles by “Subject”. There are 5 index fields, such as “Education” and “Social Sciences”, under “The Humanities and Social Sciences” subject header and another 5 index fields, such as “Psychology” and “Health Sciences”, under “The Sciences and Engineering” subject header. The subject indexes will lead to another page for the user to specify the desired type of language and literature and finally search for the requirements given.Display & Output ServicesOn the search results set window, ProQuest Digital Dissertations display the Title, Author, Degree type, School, Date, Pages and the publication number of a record. Users have the options to further view the citation and abstract of a record from 1861 onwards and the 24 page previews, displayed in thumbnail images first, of the gif file from 1997 onwards. The abstract of a record is in the htm file format and the full text of a record from 1997 is in the PDF file format.The “Marked List” is the user’s selected list of citations which can be access at a later time to print, email and download. The abstracts htm file and the full-text PDF file (from 1997 onwards) are sent to a valid email address email or alternate access from another given url, after the user verified a pin number given through email. Users can print and download citation or citation + abstract of a record directly from the internet browser. The 24 page previews are printable and downloadable direct from the intent browser. The search results may be sort by Degree date in descending order, Author in ascending order and Title in ascending order and is listed at 20 results per page. The current Proquest Digital Dissertations does not provide email alert services and cross references from other database.Proquest Digital Dissertations has migrated to a platform called ProQuest Digital Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) in July 2006. PQDT enables graduate research across the various ProQuest’s platforms which include other ProQuest databases. The new PQDT will support email alert services, downloading the PDF file format directly and browsing of records by subject indexing & institution indexing.CHAPTER 3 EMERALD FULLTEXTInterfaceEmerald (Electronic Management Research Library Database) Fulltext, a United Kingdom-based publisher online database launched in 1996, contains over 42,000 articles mainly on management disciplines. The cluttered interface database provides full text articles from more than 100 Emerald journals; however the Emerald Fulltext is using Emerald Insight as the delivery platform and Emerald Insight integrates all electronic Emerald Journals search interface in one.

The online database provides “Quick Search” and “Advanced Search” functions. The “Quick Search” function enable the user to input term/terms in the single search box and the option to simply check the individual boxes for “Phrase” , “Exact match” and “Truncation” searching. Furthermore, users can also check the individual boxes to search for match in different parts of an article such as “All Fields”, “Journal Title”, “Company Name”, “Reference Number”, and “Abstract”, “Author”, “Keywords” and “Article Title”within”All Content or My Subscribed Content. The “Advanced Search” contains 3 search boxes for inputs by the user and options to select from 10 searchable fields. The “Advanced Search” enables user to select article types for searching within “All Content” or “My Subscribed Content”.Emerald Fulltext has a function called “Save Search” which enables user to add the search to the saved search list and “Modify Search” function to amend the search criteria by selecting the appropriate searchable fields. The “Search In Results” function enables users to refine their search. By default, the search terms are automatically saved and are displayed at the bottom of the search window for later usage.Users can get help topics such as FAQs and Online Demonstration in Emerald Help by the “Help” hyperlink found at the top of the webpage. Unlike most online databases, Emerald Full text does not include a thesaurus.AccessibilityThe Emerald Fulltext (http://www.emeraldinsight.com) enables online user access to latest research and findings on the subscribed journals such as European Journal of Marketing, The TQM magazine and Management Decision from a pool of more than 100 Emerald journals. Emerald Fulltext does not provide free source to unregistered users; however users whose institutions are interested to subscribe, may sign up for a month free trial for Emerald Fulltext. . The online database can only be subscribed by libraries and institutions and there is unlimited number of concurrent users. The online database provides user the option to search or browse through the listed journals and subjects; accessing full text articles from 1994 and abstracts from 1989. The hyperlink tags available on every page provide easy navigation to other parts of the online database. Emerald Fulltext is regularly updated and is updated monthly with approximately 500 items.Search Functions & CapabilitiesEmerald Fulltext uses ‘AND’, ‘OR’ and ‘NOT’ Boolean operators in upper case. As with most databases, ‘AND’ operator is to search for articles containing all search terms, ‘OR’ operator is for searching articles containing either search terms and ‘NOT’ operator retrieves articles containing the first term and not the second term of search terms. Emerald Fulltext uses the colon ” ” for phrase searching and the parentheses ( ) to search for all the characters in the brackets. The database will search for terms in the parentheses ( ) first before continuing with other operators. The online database uses “*” as a wildcard to perform multiple character search, in any place and “?” to perform single character wildcard, in any place. The database supported nested search function by searching for terms in the inner most parentheses. Emerald Fulltext ignored ‘stop words’ to improve the search response time. BrowsingThe “Browse” function, beside the search field at the homepage of Emerald Insight, enables the user to view the journal according to “Journal Title” and “Subject”. In “Journal Title” browsing, users can click on the initial letter of a journal if user knows what they are looking for. The “Subject” browse lists all available subjects for users to click and display the results. The results will display all the available journals with the ASSN number and the dates of article added to Emerald Fulltext. Display & Output ServicesEmerald Fulltext is able to display the full documents that are from 1994 and only display abstracts from 1989 onwards with bibliographic information such as title, author, abstract, article URL, etc, etc. The search results window of Emerald Fulltext lists the results with brief information of the title, author, type of journal, year, volume, issue, document format and abstract for documents from 1989. Documents dating from 1994 onwards consist of additional information fields such as the purpose, design/methodology/approach, findings, originality/value of the documents are display in the result window. Users can view the results in 10, 25 or 50 per page. The full article are accessible from the results page by clicking on the hyperlink to launch the article, dating from 1994 onwards, on another browser in html or PDF format; however, only the html format are available for the abstract view of the articles dating from 1989 onwardsThe results can also be viewed by its types; namely, “Articles”, “Abstracts & Reviews”, “Emerald Site” and “Site Content”. The default search results are displayed in the “Articles” view as only articles published in Emerald journals collections are listed. The “Abstract & Reviews” view lists the search results from 5 Emerald databases and abstract. “Emerald Site” view lists any search term that coincides with the content on the Emerald website. “Other Content” view lists all other Emerald content such as book reviews and interviews.The search result listings can be forwarded to an email address by the “E-mail this page” link found in the search window. The search results can be marked in “My List” , which enables user to access the list at a later time, and enables saving, printing, and downloading (in ASCII) and emailing the search result listings. Individual articles and abstracts/citations are printed directly from the separate browser launched after selecting the documents format.The “Sort By” function on the result list enables the user to view the results according to the relevance of the article with the input search terms. The search results can also be display according to the latest article and newest article. Searchable terms are searched across the Fulltext website and therefore, the results will also list the cross-references from other Emerald journals.There are several alert services available to the user e.g. the database will notify the user with email alert if the user subscribed to the author alert services and there’s an article written by the chosen author. The user can also set the maximum number of alerts to be notified each week.

CHAPTER 4 LITERATURE ONLINEInterfaceLiterature Online is a United Kingdom based online resource for literary research that was first launched in 1996. It contains over one third of a million collections of English and American poetry, drama and prose, and over 192 full-text journals and other key works and references.Literature Online has a bare interface that is easy to navigate via clear hyperlinks to various parts of the database. The bare intuitive interface is easy for the amateur user who may use the “Quick Search” function that is on the left-hand navigation bar of every page to get directly to the information required. “Quick Search” searches the Literature Online indexes, and enable user to do various searches such as search an author’s name, a work title and author name plus work title. The truncation character “*” is allowed in “Quick Search”. “Search Text” is for user to search for a quotation in the poetry, prose and drama database.Durable URLs make it simple for book-marking Author and Full Text pages. This provides access to durable links of the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections from course pages as well as other web sites. There are user-friendly tables of content for all materials found on the database. The latest version Literature Online, Third Edition had been enhanced to facilitate research, teaching and learning. Literature Online is a dynamic database with regular monthly updates of new journals, biographies and other works.AccessibilityLiterature Online (http://lion.chadwyck.com) provides user access to a wide range of journal articles and critical essays, dictionaries, encyclopaedias and other reference works to assist user find meaning of literary terms and terminology. Biographies provide updated summary of recent critical approaches and user is able to follow links to bibliographies of relevant writers. A limit is set on the number of users per institution which means user will be declined access to the database when the designated number of users has been reached. There are a limited number of four concurrent users each time.Search Functions & CapabilitiesThe “Help” function allows user to get more information about any of the features available in Literature Online. If user clicks on the “Help” link on any page, it will open in a popup window. “Search Authors” is for user to search authors by name, or more specific like authors who belonged to a particular literary period or literary movement. Using one or any combination of the search boxes such as Find Author(s), Living in the year(s), Gender, Nationality, Ethnicity, Literary Movement or Literary Period will help user to retrieve information about an author. In short, both single and multi search box searches can be done in the database.Literature Online allows user to combine search terms using Boolean operators “AND”, “OR” and “NOT”. In addition, the searches can be refined by using two proximity operators “NEAR” and “FBY” (Followed BY) to look for words that are close to each other. NEAR operator is for user to narrow the search for terms that have a specified distance between each other and in any other. For example, law NEAR male or wild NEAR animal.Truncation operators or wildcard characters “*” (asterisk) and “?” (question mark) may be used to find occurrences of words that share the same opening characters but have different endings. For example, educat* may be used for education and educate.The “Search History” page records all the searches that were run during the current session except for “Quick Searches”. User can rerun searches, refine or combine them with other searches or remove them from user’s record.

BrowsingThe “Reference Shelf” contains a drop-down list that has the Concise Oxford Dictionary, Webster’s Dictionary, Shakespeare Glossary, The King James Bible and Combine Search.User is able to view full text article by going into the “Full-Text Journals” link, save document in PDF format and via email as well as the option to print the article.The “Information Centre” provides user with news on recent and upcoming updates to Literature Online, resources, content and editorial policy and most importantly contact details. “What’s New?” page show recent updates and what to expect in the near future. The “Individual Collections” link enables user to access any individual literary databases that comes with Literature Online subscription.“Search Criticism & Reference” allows user to come up with a list of information written about an author or their literary works that include references to various articles, journals and dissertations related resources, major references and relevant web links. Literature Online provides information available in the MHRA’s ABELL (Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature), the MLS International Bibliography, major reference works and on the World Wide Web. These sources can be in the form of citations, full text, article pages images or links to relevant websites.Display & Output ServicesThe “Marked List” page lists the bibliographic records user has selected and added from the “List of Result” pages during the immediate session. It allows user to create a list of records selected from searches in the current session, view the full text, email or print the list, remove records from the list or save records to “My Archive” if user want to keep a record for searches later.User can email the current list of selected records to himself or others. He also has the option to print the current list. There is a limit of 500 records to each list of selected records.“User Statistics” is useful to retrieve the time of day, sessions, searches, hits, searches returning no hits, full texts accessed, full record accessed and users denied access.“Poets on Screen” allows user to access to the multimedia collection available on Literature Online. It features filmed readings by poets and major authors analysing their works and those of their predecessors.Being a dynamic database, Literature Online is constantly growing as new material gets licensed and approved to be stored in digital format. It has an impressive library of primary works that has been selected by academics that are experts in the field covering all literary periods and genres. Literature Online also benefits from all the features associated with Chadwyck-Healey, Proquest Information and learning’s specialist humanities imprint. Some of these features include editorial quality, detailed coverage and inclusiveness, textual accuracy and detailed SGML coding and manual indexing.

CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSIONSAll the three databases evaluated provide easy navigation to and from individual pages however, only Proquest Digital Dissertations and Literature Online provides user-friendly search and simple interface. Although each database caters for different information retrieval, all of them are updated regularly. Literature Online provides access to only a few concurrent users thus it will be difficult to access the database during peak periods such as exams, unlike the other two databases which provides for unlimited concurrent users.The standard Boolean Operators, ‘AND’ , ‘OR’, and nested searching, are used in all the evaluated databases thus, the users need not learn additional Boolean Operators when switching in between databases. Proquest Digital Dissertations and Literature Online are the only evaluated databases that use proximity function and which saves time for the users by narrowing the results and thus returned relevant articles.The three evaluated databases cater to both users with little search knowledge with basic search level interface and users with advance search knowledge with advanced search level interface. The ‘search history’ and the ‘save search’ functions in the databases enable easy referral to past searches and saves time for the users. Users who are totally unaware of searching capabilities can access the help functions that are easily available from the hypertext tag found on every page at each databases.Most of the articles are downloaded as a PDF format files. PDF format files take up smaller memory space on the desktop and thus, users can download a few articles without affecting the memory of their hard disk and users just need to download the PDF file viewer to view the articles. Brief view of the document attributes enables the users to decide on reading the article further or ignore the article thus; this feature saves unnecessary time for downloading irrelevant articles.Proquest Digital Dissertations is the only database that does not provide relevance ranking which is a major disadvantage because users might have to sieve through multiple records to retrieve the relevant documents. Cross-search functions in all the databases enable the user to drop the hassle of going through several platforms for research which is time consuming.

7 REFERENCESChowdhury, G.G, & Chowdhury,S.(2001).Information Sources and Searching on the World Wide Web. London: Library Association Publishing.Vibert,C.(2004).An introduction to online competitive intelligence research : search strategies, research case study, research problems, and data source evaluations and reviews. Ohio:Thomson/Texere.Ackermann, E.C., & Hartman,K.(2001).The information searcher’s guide to searching + researching on the Internet + W3. Canada: Wilsonville.Nanyang Technological University Library.(2006). User guide on Digital Dissertations via Proquest.

Retrieved on Aug 15, 2006, (http://www.ntu.edu.sg/lib/collections/db/AAZ-5127.htm).

Nanyang Technological University Library.(2006). User guide on Emerald Fulltext. Retrieved on Aug 20, 2006, (http://www.ntu.edu.sg/lib/collections/db/ABA-5406.htm).

Nanyang Technological University Library. (2006). User guide on Literature Online Retrieved on Aug 30, 2006, (http://www.ntu.edu.sg/lib/collections/db/A362838.htm).

COMPARISON TABLE

TABLE 1 COMPARISON TABLE