CU Library offers new online search system

By Elizabeth Fontana

Cornell faculty, staff and students now have a set of powerful new tools to search for and connect to Cornell Library's electronic resources. The new system, which is available online from the Library Gateway at http://www.library.cornell.edu, has three service components: "Find Articles," "Find e-Journals" and "Find Databases."

"Find Articles" allows users to search for articles in more than one online database at the same time and to link directly from a citation to full text, when full text is available. "Find e-Journals" is a searchable, browsable list of more than 20,000 electronic journals that are licensed by the library for use by the Cornell community. "Find Databases" supports finding and connecting to online indexes and other electronic resources, such as Biosis and the Columbia Encyclopedia. The new services replace and extend the functionality of the library's previous "e-Reference Collection," which had been in place since early 1998.

The initiative to build the new system, which is based on software called ENCompass, began three years ago, after the library was named a Sun Center for Excellence in Digital Libraries. At that time Cornell formed an alliance with Sun Microsystems Inc. and Endeavor Information Systems Inc. to co-develop ENCompass, a digital library product that supports integrated access -- or "one stop shopping" -- for local digital collections, as well as for commercially or freely available scholarly content on the Web.

Tom Hickerson, associate university librarian for information technologies and special collections, noted that: "The Endeavor-Cornell partnership has been very successful. Endeavor chose Cornell to help develop ENCompass because the library is well-known for its corps of skilled developers and testers of digital library applications."

The library's new search services integrate thousands of research-quality online indexes, abstracting services, full text resources and e-journals, most of which are not available on the Internet to the general public. They provide an alternative for students who find that the Web doesn't offer a sufficiently wide and reliable range of resources for their class work. As one student who tested the service this summer put it, the new system is "like Google for scholarly sources."

Studies conducted by the Online Computer Library Center, a nonprofit group of more than 41,000 public and college libraries, suggest that while most students begin their research projects using commercial search engines, they are not satisfied with the quality of the information they find.

Asked about the significance of the new system for the Cornell community, University Librarian Sarah Thomas remarked: "We're finding that students and researchers want more flexible ways to locate information in a variety of formats. ENCompass offers us a progressive strategy to meet user needs and deliver quality resources in a convenient manner."

To learn more about the library's new research services, visit http://campusgw.library.cornell.edu/newhelp/res_tools/find_articles_dbs/index.html or contact the library's ENCompass project manager, Karen Calhoun, at ksc10@cornell.edu.