March 2, 1995: Vol26n19: UB Libraries add ten new indexes to Bison database
By LISA WILEY
News Bureau Staff
Just in time for the spring semester, the UB Libraries have added 10
new indexes to the BISON database system. The indexes, which went
on-line last month, also will serve several other smaller State
University of New York campuses as a part of the Joint Database Access
Pilot Project funded by the SUNY Office of Educational Technology. UB
will serve the SUNY colleges at Brockport, Geneseo, Cobleskill,
Oneonta and Oswego; community colleges in Broome County and Jamestown,
and the State University Institute of Technology at Utica-Rome.
	The project marks the first collaborative venture to use the
computer capacity of a SUNY center to provide access to information
databases at SUNY colleges and community colleges using client/server
technology, according to Barbara von Wahlde, associate vice president
for University Libraries.
	The new BISON indexes are the Biography Index, Book Review
Digest, Art Index, Essay and General Literature Index, Business
Abstracts, Biological and Agricultural Index, Education Index, Library
Literature, Index to Legal Periodical and ERIC.
	BISON's Readers' Guide, Humanities Index, Social Sciences
Index and Applied Science & Technology Abstracts also have been
extended to the other campuses.
	ERIC is the federal higher education periodical-and-abstract
index that references reports, articles and dissertations related to
educational topics. The other databases, compiled by the H.W. Wilson
Company, offer access to a broad range of periodical indexes and
abstracts in law, the humanities, social sciences, general sciences
and education.
BISON users now routinely conduct more than 3 million information
searches each month.
 "That's a very high number, even in comparison to other
universities," von Wahlde said. She expects that number will increase
with the new databases and  traffic from the eight remote campuses.
	Distributed database systems greatly increase student and
faculty access to library resources and information. Rather than
loading massive files on each local system, the current plan is to
mount the databases on one system and then share them with the other
participating sites across the network.
	The public may access the UB Libraries catalogue and ERIC
through the Buffalo FREE-NET or via remote access to BISON. FREE-NET
offers community access to an astonishing array of information,
educational resources and the Internet at no charge to the user.