Reporter Volume 25, No.29 June 13, 1994

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Bureau Staff
The libraries of the State University of New York campuses at Buffalo,
Binghamton and Stony Brook, and those at City University of New York,
the state's other publicly funded university system, have embarked on
a unique project to share access to large and expensive commercial
database products via their local on-line library systems.
	The project, which was spearheaded by the UB Libraries, allows
participating libraries to share indexes to a vast number of journals
and newspapers. The SUNY-CUNY distributed database serves more than
200,000 students and faculty. The library at the State University of
New York at Albany, with an additional 17,000 potential users, hopes
to join the project in the fall.
	Barbara von Wahlde, director of university libraries at UB,
said this is the first distributed network for sharing access to
commercial index/abstract databases among university libraries. She
said it will serve as a pilot project for other regional groups,
state-affiliated institutions and university consortiums across the
country.
	Distributed database systems greatly increase student and
faculty access to library resources and information. Rather than being
loaded on each local system, databases are mounted on one system and
then shared with the other participating sites across the network.
	In the SUNY-CUNY model, each institution loads, maintains and
distributes among its partners specific databases to which the latter
do not have ready access. These are accessed seamlessly using the
on-line library systems on each campus. All three SUNY university
centers and CUNY use the NOTIS automated system. Site license
arrangements with data providers have been negotiated to make this
service possible.
	In addition to greatly expanding resources available to
library users on each campus, the shared database model saves money
for participating libraries by eliminating duplication of computer and
human resources at each site. The system is expected to reduce each
institution's user licensing fees while making available a new and
diverse group of expensive information products. 
	In the case of the SUNY-CUNY project, the participating
libraries access the respective databases across the Internet.
B provides PsychInfo, a huge database
	that provides references and abstracts from international
journals, dissertations and technical reports in psychology and
related fields. The University at Binghamton provides the ABI Inform
database, a periodical index with abstracts from 800 business and
economics journals. Stony Brook offers Dissertation Abstracts, a
database that carries abstracts of all international doctoral
dissertations from 1861 to the present.
	CUNY provides Newspaper Abstracts, an index referencing and
abstracting articles in 27 major newspapers.
	Access to the shared databases is currently available only to
students and faculty members at participating institutions, not to
members of the community with network access to local university
library systems. Dial-in users must enter their library-card barcode
number when they ask to use the database products.
	The initial SUNY-CUNY project supports the program for one
year, during which data on usage and effectiveness will be pooled and
evaluated.
	The linkage system used at the four current sites is NOTIS
PACLink, which uses the Z39.50 Information Retrieval protocol to
transfer information among machines in a manner that is transparent
and seamless for end-users.