Vol. 14 No. 3
February 2000

Rebecca A. Wilson, Editor

NEW FEATURE IN iLINK!

Have you wanted a list of all the videos or periodicals in the Library? You can now use the new access tabs (Periodicals List, Video List) on iLink to generate such a list. A search box will open. If you want all the titles for either, just press enter to create the list. If you want periodicals or videos on a particular topic (such as war films), enter your term[s] in the search box. Your results will be restricted to video or periodical records that contain those terms. Thanks to Pat Fishbein, Sheila Fisher & our Sirsi consultant Kim Granquist for making this available.

Faculty are reminded that at this time of year, orders sufficient to expend the departmental allocations for books and videos need to be submitted by to March 1^st. Unspent funds will be pooled for general purchases after that date. All orders should be sent to Ann Marie Rompolski in Acquisitions as soon as possible. Ann Marie will be going on maternity leave sometime in March so there is some urgency to get orders in and processed prior to her departure.

Please recall that books can be ordered electronically, on order cards, or via publishers’ catalogs which can be marked and returned with a cover note. Please include your name or initials, and the account to which items should be charged.

WELCOME NEW ACLCP MEMBERS

At the last meeting of the Governing Board Meeting of the Associated College Libraries of Central Pennsylvania (ACLCP), the group unanimously agreed to accept two new member libraries into the Association: Penn College of Technology in Williamsport, and the United States Army War College in Carlisle. To qualify for membership, a library must be sponsored by an existing member library and must meet certain criteria which will ensure active and adequate participation in the Association’s programs. The decision was based on information gathered during on-site visits by a 3-person team. The libraries were evaluated based on their geographic proximity to other libraries in the consortium, their budgets, levels of staffing, materials and other resources, electronic and networking capabilities, and willingness to share in a variety of cooperative agreements. Kathleen Gunning chaired the site visit team for Penn College.

This brings the total membership of ACLCP libraries to 22. Due to reciprocal borrowing agreements among the libraries, students at any of the member colleges may borrow materials directly from the collections of these libraries.

It is with great pleasure that we extend a most warm welcome to the library staff at Penn College and the U.S. Army War College. We look forward to meeting our colleagues at the upcoming Spring meeting on March 17, 2000, hosted by Harrisburg Area Community College.

More information about ACLCP, as well as the online catalog with member libraries’ holdings, is at: http://aclcp.org.

Just a reminder: Once again, Federal and PA tax forms are available near the Reference Desk in the Library. Forms are also available on the web (all sites listed below either have the forms or have links to the forms):

http://www.irs.ustreas.gov/

At the request of faculty in the Art Department, the Library has made a one-time purchase of Art Index Retrospective, an online, citation-only index to articles published 1929 -1984. Created by the H.W. Wilson Company, the database allows users to "tap into decades of the literature of art to find information on artists, movements, and critical reaction from contemporaries". The Index permits the "tracking of reproductions of any work of interest published in more than half a century of leading serials". More than 420 art publications spanning 55 years are included in the Index.

You can access Art Index Retrospective from any SU networked computer.

This Index is an online version of H.W.Wilson’s Art Index. Articles published after 1984 can be accessed by selecting the ArtAbstracts database in OCLC’s FirstSearch.

To continue its goal of increasing remote access to resources, the Library recently converted its print subscription to the Music Index to the online version when it became available late last year. The Music Index is a citation-only index to more than 640 international music periodicals. According to its publisher, Harmonie Press, "topics concerned with every aspect of the classical and popular world are… organized according to… an internal Subject Heading List. A broad range of subjects are indexed, covering musicological and organological topics, plus book reviews, record reviews, first performances, and obituaries". Music literature from 1979 – 1998 is indexed thus far. Data from 1999 is now being prepared for entry; once that is completed, the database will be current to within 3 months.

You can access the Music Index from any SU networked computer.

Searches in both databases can be performed in either the basic or the advanced/expert mode.

To expedite access, cataloger Pat Fishbein will be adding a shortcut button from the Library’s Home Page for both of these databases in the near future.

…AND A REMINDER

Please recall that the MLA (Modern Language Association) Bibliography is now available via FirstSearch from any networked computer. Faculty and students accustomed to using the CD-ROM product can now enjoy remote access to this valuable resource in literature, languages, linguistics and folklore. Going back to 1963, the database indexes articles from over 6000 journals, dissertations and other sources.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE: THE CORC PROJECT

The OCLC Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC) Project is a state-of-the-art, Web-based service that is being developed and used by OCLC and libraries around the globe. CORC is a cooperative effort to create a high-quality, library-selected database of Web-based electronic resource descriptions that will organize and identify relevant resources in electronic format.

At a recent meeting of the American Library Association, one of the panelists described the CORC Project as a "vibrant and expanding project comparable to the start of OCLC some 30 years ago. The Internet cries out for a cooperative solution similar to the creation of WorldCat. What better model to use for building a database of high quality, Web-based resources than one that has been successful in building the world’s preeminent database of bibliographic information?"

Just as materials currently available in libraries are carefully selected to provide a certain quality, so too will electronic resources be chosen on the basis of quality, relevance and stability before being cataloged and entered by a participating library.

You may preview the CORC Web site at:

URL: http://purl.oclc.org/CORC/

Then: Log on to CORC

Select: Search the Catalog

A search for "Vermeer, Jan" or "dissection and frogs" will bring up examples of a few of the resources cataloged thus far. Once an entry is selected, the top portion of the screen provides descriptive information and identifies the item as being a computer file, slide, web resource, etc. The lower portion displays the file itself. Pricing for access to the CORC Project has not yet been finalized by OCLC.

You may recall that WorldCat, available through FirstSearch, is a worldwide database with over 40 million bibliographic records. Holdings include records of any type of material (books, videos, scores, maps, media, serials, recordings, etc.) cataloged by OCLC member libraries, including manuscripts written as early as the 12th century.

OCLC MEASURES SCOPE OF THE WEB

An article in the OCLC Newsletter (Sept/Oct 1999) reports results from a research project that measures the scope of the Web. Researchers at OCLC have determined that the World Wide Web has about 3.6 million sites, of which 2.2 million are publicly accessible. These public sites contain nearly 300 million Web pages.

It was also determined that significant portions of the Web are not publicly accessible or do not offer meaningful content. About 400,000 Web sites can be considered "private", in that they do not offer content that is accessible without fee or prior authorization. Also, about 1 million sites are in a transitory or unfinished state, i.e., "Under Construction" or contain content that is trivial.

Other findings: The mean size of a public Web site is about 129 pages; the Web is dominated by a relatively small collection of "megasites" – the largest 25,000 sites contain about 50 percent of all pages on public sites; the number of sites and their size are climbing; adult content claims only a small proportion of the Web; about 2 percent of the public sites (42,000 of the 2.2 million) contains sexually explicit material.

More information about web statistics and analysis is available at: