A Six-Week Bonanza

of Scholarly Articles

Get 'em while they're hot! Through the efforts of SUNY's Office of Library and Information Services, UB faculty, students and staff have been given a trial subscription to the OCLC FirstSearch Electronic Collections Online (ECO). ECO includes full-text versions of more than 1,100 journal titles. Participating publishers include Academic Press, Blackwell, Chapman & Hall, Kluwer, MIT and the Royal Society of Chemistry. While the current ECO list of publishers leans more toward scientific, technical and medical disciplines, the service is branching out into social-science areas such as education, psychology and sociology. For a list of all the journals available for searching, visit the ECO Publishers and Journals homepage at http://www2.oclc.org/oclc/fseco/publish.htm.

To start using ECO, point your Web browser to http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/cgi/fs.cgi and then click on "Start FirstSearch." After entering FirstSearch, click on ECO and you will be presented with a Basic Search screen. Type your keywords in the subject box. You can use the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT between words: spinal and injury, tornado or hurricane, virus not computer. You can also use a plus (+) to search for singular and plural keywords: storm+ (=storm or storms). Unless you want to search for an author, words in the title or a specific journal, your search is ready to be processed, but do make sure that the "Limits Journals" line is set to "All Journals" since the University Libraries do not currently subscribe to any of these journals online via ECO.

ECO will run your search and return results in batches of about 10 citations at a time. Each citation will have two links at the end, one for the abstract and one for the full-text (PDF or RIF). If you wish to read the abstract before getting the full article, there is another link to full-text following the abstract. Before you can bring up the full-text of an article, you will need to download Adobe Acrobat Reader at http://www.adobe.com. Though most of the publishers in ECO use Adobe Acrobat to present their full-text, a few use RealPage software, which can be downloaded for free at http://204.151.7.91/realpage.htm.

The trial access to Electronic Collections Online will end on Nov. 30. Take advantage of this opportunity to obtain useful scholarly material from the convenience of your computer. Please send your feedback concerning ECO to libweb@acsu.buffalo.edu.

For assistance in connecting to the World Wide Web, contact the ASCIT Help Desk at 645-3542. For assistance in searching Electronic Collections Online, contact Don Hartman at (unldon@acsu.buffalo.edu) or 645-6582.

-Gemma DeVinney and Don Hartman, University Libraries