|
Choice, September 2003
Library
Journal, March 2003
Choice, March 2004
Review from: Choice,
March 2004
Humanities Full Text
(HFT) is a revved up version of Wilson's familiar Humanities Index.
The interface is new, and the "advanced level" search form
offers a variety of options. The index extends back to 1984, and full text
begins with 1995. Other convenient features are a searchable thesaurus,
and browse capability that is good at articulating subjects. Indexing
remains straightforward, yet furnishes good depth. The database continues
to cover a broad expanse of publishing, archaeology to music to philosophy
to world history. It indexes 532 titles, 185 in full text. One may well
ask whether this relatively small number of journals can adequately cover
the vast terrain of subjects the database attempts. The answer will vary
from one institution to another, but it is clear that HFT (especially its
full-text portion) will not bear the weight of graduate or even
upper-division projects. For instance, a subject search for Shakespeare on
the advanced menu retrieved 4,044 citations!, but limiting the search to
full-text and PDF files reduced the hits to 398 and 141. A new, powerful
option packaged with HFT is an icon that connects to the link-resolver SFX;
at no extra charge one can integrate via SFX existing full-text open
URL-compliant titles into HFT from competing aggregators to which one's
institution subscribes (e.g., EBSCO, ProQuest). Titles in those databases
are then highlighted as available in HFT. Despite this bold maneuver, HFT
remains primarily oriented toward lower-division undergraduates or
institutions that lack resources for more specialized, discipline-specific
databases.
Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates.
Reviewed by J. Millhorn,
Northern Illinois University
Review from: Choice, September 2003
Inviting
and ambitious, this redesign of the WilsonWeb interface marries innovative
natural language searching from Verity and the authoritative indexing and
abstracting from Wilson's librarian-indexers. Humanities Full Text offers
indexing of approximately 500 core English-language humanities journals
back to 1984, abstracting from 1994, and full text of about 100 journals
from 1994. The new interface offers many slick features, such as custom
sorting by relevancy, date, or other fields; the option to save searches
to rerun at a later date, and linking to a local online catalog or several
full-text suppliers. It also allows sophisticated retrieval such as word
stemming and synonym extraction. But while novice searchers may relish
large search results sets, that same search bounty may ironically prove
off-putting to experienced users who prize Wilson's meticulous indexing
and subject thesauri for their precise retrieval. A search in basic or
advanced modes across all fields for the labor group "wobblies" will also
retrieve the phrase "wobbly knees." One can narrow retrieval by searching
specific fields, using the online thesaurus, placing quotations around
phrases, and limiting to specific document types, but many first-time
users may be puzzled by results that do not appear to contain their search
words....The "WilsonLink" utility allows account administrators to set up
linking to full-text articles from other publishers, such as JSTOR or
Project MUSE, but libraries must choose between several predefined groups
of full-text vendors, rather than creating a custom list; besides, many
links are to the journal level, rather than to the specific article cited.
Since the initial release of this new interface, Wilson has adjusted
several elements in response to user feedback, so perhaps by the time this
review is published many of these navigation and linking issues will have
been addressed....
Summing Up:
Recommended. General readers; undergraduates; graduate students.
Review from:
Library Journal, March 15, 2003
Here is another database available through the evolving WilsonWeb
interface. As noted in our last column (LJ 3/1/03, p. 128), Wilson will
incorporate many reviewers' suggestions about the interface into the next
update to the WilsonWeb, due out this month. Comments in this review will
focus more on the content of the database than the interface issues that
have already been addressed.
Here the term humanities covers conventional humanities disciplines:
literature, religion, philosophy, and music. It also includes subjects
that are traditionally considered to be social sciences, such as
archaeology, area studies, and journalism. This interdisciplinary coverage
is useful for research projects at all levels. Indexing goes back as far
as 1984 for some journals, with full-text coverage for selected titles
beginning in 1995. A tab in the Help screen leads to information about
journal coverage, and this dynamically created list includes start/end
dates of indexing and/or full-text coverage as well as peer review status.
At this point, 506 titles are listed in the Humanities Full
Text database, including
active as well as ceased or dropped titles.
Before searching, users must select a database, the names of which are
listed on the search screen; depending on a library's subscription, this
partial-screen window could have quite a few options. Only nine database
titles appear in the window at a time, and it took this reviewer a few
seconds to realize that scrolling was possible. Novice users may catch on
to this more quickly, but will they know what database to select? For
research on Shakespeare, what's the difference between the Humanities,
Readers' Guide, and Biography Reference Bank databases?
The Advanced search is the default, which is sure to be loved by
librarians but which may overwhelm many users who really do need a basic
search. Advanced searches were much slower than those done in Basic and
Browse modes. Searches cannot be modified from the results screen, meaning
that users must retype their entire search if a spelling error is made.
Search fields include the usual author, title, subject, publication year,
and peer review options as well as some unusual document types, such as
the dance, oratorio, and operetta review options. There's also the
"Publication, Julian date" field, which is curiously absent from
the field descriptions in Help. For those looking for the field tag
descriptions (more likely librarians than average users), one does not go
to the Help link but to the "database description" tab therein.
Users looking to differentiate the Source and Journal Name fields must be
persistent in their hunt. For the curious: the Source field contains more
bibliographic information than the Journal Name field.
The default search results screen lists ten citations, ranked in
relevance order; both of these are options that can be changed. Clicking
on the title will lead to the citation, along with the abstract if it is
available. The WilsonLink icon leads to an SFX link, listing where full
text is available through other aggregators (such as Expanded Academic
Index, FirstSearch, ProjectMUSE, SwetsNavigator), plus table of contents
options from each of these aggregators. SFX links are also provided to the
Web of Science databases and SearchERIC as well as to the option to search
a web engine. As mentioned in previous reviews, libraries need to be able
to customize this page to point only to the sources to which they
subscribe. Otherwise, they will mislead users. WilsonWeb is also not as
OpenURL-compliant as it might be, and some SFX links do not send users to
the actual article. In trying to replicate the work of an average user, I
searched for "Shakespeare" on the Advanced screen. It was slow
owing to the full-text searching involved, and obviously far too many hits
were retrieved. Narrowing by field (in this case, subject) is recommended,
as is adding other terms. Adding the term "women" as a subject
narrowed the retrieval to 103 citations; further narrowing to
peer-reviewed journals left a manageable 58 citations. This is why novice
users will find the Browse search useful; one must pick a field to browse.
In this case, there are many subheadings-and the number of hits for
each-listed under the main subject of Shakespeare. The search history
feature allows combining of previous searches.
The Bottom Line: The Humanities Full
Text database is a boon
for basic and advanced scholars alike, and its interdisciplinary coverage
is commendable. The new interface still needs some usability testing and
tweaking, and I look forward to seeing improvements in the new release.
Recommended for public, academic, and school libraries.
Reviewed by Helene Williams, Collection Development, Widener Library,
Harvard University
|
