Charles Walcott, right, professor of neurobiology and behavior, and Peiyum She, graduate student in rural sociology,
take part in a Web-searching techniques workshop taught by Philip Davis, instructional technology librarian, in the
Stone Center of Mann Library on Tuesday.Denise Weldon/University Photography
This is not your parents' library.
Well, perhaps it is, but it's more. Along with the buildings, books, periodicals and reference rooms, today's Cornell University Library is also an online presence, giving Cornellians access to several hundred electronic databases.
Want to know about AIDS and cancer research? Anti-stalking laws? Ethnic classifications in the U.S. census? The chemical composition of artificial fats? The effect of volcanic eruptions on the weather? It's all there, and with a few clicks from the Bear Access menu, you can find what might have taken hours of research in the stacks.
"The expansion of electronic resources available to the Cornell community is a cornerstone in the building of the digital library," said Sarah Thomas, the Carl A. Kroch University Librarian. "Our goal is to increase access to important materials for faculty and students and to make that access more convenient, enabling our readers to draw on these valuable digital sources anytime, any place, through their Cornell accounts."
There are two ways to access online databases. Both can be reached through the Cornell Library Web page at <http://www.library. cornell.edu/library/#libelec>. Under "Library Electronic Resources," click on "Networked Indexes and Abstracts" or "Mann Library Gateway." These can be also reached from the Library Resources button on the Bear Access menu. There are technical reasons for having multiple options, but the library is moving toward consolidating these two lists into one, said Edward Weissman, assistant to the university librarian.
While anyone with a Web browser can see the lists, many of the databases can be opened only by users with a Cornell netID and password. It's one of the perks of belonging to the Cornell community.
Some databases provide the full texts of articles in magazines, newspapers and scholarly journals. Others are "bibliographic" databases which index the articles in journals, enabling users to search through hundreds of journals at once and obtain a list of articles on a topic of interest.
The library subscribes to the fee-based databases on behalf of all currently enrolled students and currently employed faculty and staff, paying much less than it would cost if everyone subscribed on an individual basis. "There is a line item in the library's materials budget for electronic resources which has grown substantially in recent years," said Ross Atkinson, deputy university librarian.
Thirty new databases have been added this semester, including three that have been widely requested by the faculty, the Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index and Arts and Humanities Citation Index.
Experienced users will find that many of the old familiar databases have been spruced up, with Web-based interfaces and simplified searching tools. Others, however, still use a text-based telnet interface, and that can sometimes be intimidating. Several units of the library offer instruction on using networked databases. This includes instruction related to individual courses, but also workshops open to the entire community. The latter are listed at <http://www.library.cornell. edu/library/current.html>. The Mann Library Gateway page also provides online tutorials under "Instruction."