May 5th, 2012
Review by CCL-EAR Committee
Virtual Reference Library, a product offered by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning, is a database that contains electronic reference books that are published by Gale and its affiliate publishers. This database contains reference books only, and these books can only be retrieved through
Gale’s Powersearch interface (though these books can be cross searched with all other Gale databases that use the Powersearch interface).
An institution purchases the electronic books either as a collection with deep consortium discounts, or individually. This review looks mainly at the collection with respect to information database and cost.
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Committee’s Overall Assessment:
Committee’s Standard Evaluation Chart:
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Tags: Gale
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April 16th, 2012
Preview by CCL-EAR Committee
GREENR, a product offered by Cengage Learning (Gale), focuses on the physical, social, and economic aspects of environmental issues. Topic, organization, and country portals form research centers around issues covering energy systems, health care, agriculture, climate change, population, and economic development. Portals include authoritative analysis, academic journals, news, case studies, legislation, conference proceedings, primary source documents, statistics, and rich multimedia.”
Media content comes from videos clips (5,037), broadcast transcripts (96), and interviews (91). Print content is comprised of two major formats –periodicals and reference material. GREENR supplies articles from 998 periodical titles (51 embargoed), nearly one third of which are peer-reviewed.
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Tags: Gale
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April 11th, 2012
Review by CCL-EAR Committee
A-Z, a product offered by EBSCO, is an online serial locator tool that helps library staff and users find and keep track of full-text, electronic serial content across multiple providers and aggregators.
The purpose of an A-to-Z title list is to help end users quickly identify serial resources (print or online) that a library offers. EBSCO A-to-Z is a cost-effective way to streamline access to aggregate databases from multiple providers, and is a workhorse tool that can help libraries maintain a significant measure of control over extensive and diverse content from various sources.
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Committee’s Overall Assessment:
Committee’s Standard Evaluation Chart:
| Database Content | |
| Search Interface | |
| User Support Services | |
| Cost | |
| Accessibility/Availability of Service | |
VN:RO [1.8.8_1072]
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Tags: EBSCO
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April 11th, 2012
Review by CCL-EAR Committee
360 Core, a product offered by Serials Solutions, help library staff and users identify and keep track of full-text, electronic serial content across multiple producers and aggregators.
Serials Solutions 360 Core is a cost-effective way to streamline access to aggregate databases from multiple providers and help libraries maintain a significant measure of control over extensive and diverse content from various sources. Users can use it to easily identify all serials (and other select content) available from a library, regardless of the format or location. After the initial setup, the program and its content are relatively easy to maintain, update, or customize.
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Committee’s Overall Assessment:
Committee’s Standard Evaluation Chart:
| Database Content | |
| Search Interface | |
| User Support Services | |
| Cost | |
| Accessibility/Availability of Service | |
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Tags: ProQuest
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March 21st, 2012
Preview by CCL-EAR Committee
Vocational Biographies describes its product as “The career success stories of 1001 real people”. It is similar in purpose to the Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH) in that it provides information on over 1000 careers. Each entry includes information on required education/certification, working conditions, job outlook, and salary range in an easy to read and often entertaining format. What sets it apart from the OOH is its first person narrative from people in the field.
While there are freely available sites on the Internet that describe various careers, none (in this reviewer’s experience) has the breadth or readability of Vocational Biographies.
This is a product badly in need of a makeover. A revamp of their job titles and some basic web-based search assistance would greatly improve this database.
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March 18th, 2012
Product Statement by CCL-EAR Committee
OPACs lack many of the features that students have come to expect from their interactive online information sources. As a gateway to a library’s collection, the OPAC needs an upgrade. Reinventing the OPAC has become a lot easier with the advent of catalog enhancement products, which allow a library to dramatically improve the catalog’s look and feel, search capabilities, and social interactivity without having to go to the effort and expense of replacing the entire ILS. VuFind, LibraryThing for Libraries, and WorldCat Local are three catalog enhancement products that will engage students with a more familiar interactive experience.
All three catalog enhancement products are intended to make a library’s OPAC interface more interactive and engaging for the user. Choosing which of these enhancement options to go with will depend on a library’s resources in terms of both budget and staffing. LibraryThing for Libraries and WorldCat Local do not require a lot of system maintenance or technical expertise on the part of a library’s staff, but these options will cost more than VuFind, which is an open-source product. VuFind offers the most flexibility of all of the products; libraries have the freedom to change the source code and customize features according to their needs or preferences. VuFind does require more staff time (for installation and maintenance) as well as technical expertise of a dedicated programmer or in-house staff.
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March 18th, 2012
Review by CCL-EAR Committee
The Nursing Resource Center (NRC) is a reference database combining content from nursing and allied health textbooks, encyclopedias, drug monographs, multimedia (such as video and animations), care plans, as well as access to Nursing and Allied Health periodical literature. Libraries that are considering this database for journal content may be well advised that this database provides access to citations only unless a library decides to purchase, as an addition to the NRC, the Gale Nursing and Allied Health Collection periodical file. It should be noted that the vendor’s current offer to the CCLC includes the Nursing and Allied Health [Periodical] Collection to complement NRC holdings.
In terms of content, the Nursing Resource Center database suffers from some major shortcomings. Many of its reference titles are outdated and nursing periodicals are lacking in coverage of core titles. For these reasons the reviewers’ overall assessment of this database is that it may not be a worthwhile purchase for two-year colleges with accredited nursing programs.
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Committee’s Overall Assessment:
Committee’s Standard Evaluation Chart:
| Database Content | |
| Search Interface | |
| User Support Services | |
| Cost | |
| Accessibility/Availability of Service | |
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Tags: Gale
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February 14th, 2012
Preview by CCL-EAR Committee
NBC Learn is the online video archive for NBC news programming. Currently, the database includes over 11,000 closed-captioned videos which can be embedded in course management systems, shared via social media or e-mail, or downloaded for offline viewing.
The NBC Learn database is a straightforward, easy to use, attractive database. The subjects covered are likely to be of interest to multiple disciplines, and the database includes features useful for both students and instructors. Libraries looking to add accessible streaming media content to their database offerings will likely want to review this database.
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February 10th, 2012
Review by CCL-EAR Committee
Films on Demand is a streaming video collection that provides unlimited, 24/7 access to more than 3,000 videos and 33,000 segments – all closed captioned. This collection was created specifically for California Community Colleges.
These videos cover topics in Humanities & Social Sciences, Business & Economics, Science & Mathematics, Health & Medicine, Technical Education, and Counseling & Careers.
Download the full text of our review for more details.
Committee’s Overall Assessment:
Committee’s Standard Evaluation Chart:
| Database Content | |
| Search Interface | |
| User Support Services | |
| Cost | |
| Accessibility/Availability of Service | |
VN:RO [1.8.8_1072]
Rating: 3.0/4 (2 votes cast)
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Tags: InfoBase Publishing
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December 5th, 2011
Preview by CCL-EAR Committee
World eBook Library originated in 1995 and claims to be “Where the world goes to read.” The collection currently comprises 2,100,000 books in PDF, 10,000 audiobook MP3 files, and is adding over 55,000 resources each month.
It seems as though the bulk of this enormous collection is freely available, and more readily found and read, on the Internet. World eBook Library’s MARC records does permits a library to integrate individual ebooks, or the entire World eBook Library, into its catalog.
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