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Reviewed
by: Library Journal, January 2001 issue
This multidisciplinary
database contains full-text articles from over 1300 magazines, journals,
and newspapers dating back to 1994 (see below). The file is updated four
times per week from the following Wilson databases: Art Full Text, Applied
Science & Technology Full Text, Biological & Agricultural Index,
Education Full Text, General Science Full Text, Index to Legal Periodicals
& Books, Library Literature and Information Science Full Text, Readers’
Guide Full Text, Social Sciences Full Text, and Wilson Business Full Text.
Because Omnifile culls
from such a wide range of databases, the journals run the gamut from
popular to scholarly to obscure. A sampling of titles from Omnifile’s
journals list includes Consumers’ Research Magazine, Film
Criticism, Harvard International Law Journal, History and
Theory, Library Journal, and Modern Machine Shop. The
journal list is easy to reach from the Wilson Web database selection page
(hurrah!) and in addition to providing titles and dates of coverage also
gives an up-to-date count of the total number of journals indexed.
Most users will do well to
start with SearchPlus, as it offers more assisted, focused searching than
the basic Search (although the context-sensitive help screen linked to
basic Search offers assistance with a link to a list of examples—and
examples such as these are essential to a new, harried user). In
SearchPlus you can limit a search to peer-reviewed journals and then limit
to any of the 11 Wilson databases. It’s curious, however, that Wilson
provides the option here to limit to full-text articles when Omnifile
is a 100 percent full-text database.
The database’s use of the
word "in" as an operator for limiting a search to a specific
field can be problematic. If you’re looking for a movie review of Men
in Black you must enter: men "in" black. If the word
"in" is not enclosed by quotes, the system will send back an
error message because it cannot find a field labeled "black" in
the database.
When compared to similar
(though not completely full-text) databases, Omnifile comes up
short in terms of coverage. Bell & Howell’s ProQuest Research
Library and Gale Group’s Info TracTrac One File cover more journals and
extend back to the early 1980s. Gale Group’s General Reference Center
Gold indexes fewer titles, but it also reaches back to the early 1980s.
The Bottom Line: Omnifile
Full Text is recommended (with minor reservations) for public and
academic libraries seeking a multidisciplinary database of full-text
periodical articles. The quick response time, 100 percent availability of
full-text, and easy printing, saving, and e-mailing of records will appeal
to many. |
