An in-house alternative to traditional SDI services at Argonne National Laboratory
Robert Noel, R.R. Dominiak · University of North Texas Digital Library (University of North Texas) · 1997
Selective Dissemination of Information (SDIs) are based on automated, well-defined programs that regularly produce precise, relevant bibliographic information. Librarians have typically turned to information vendors such as Dialog or STN international to design and implement these searches for their users in business, academia, and the science community. Because Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) purchases the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Current Contents tapes (all subject areas excluding Humanities). ANL scientists enjoy the benefit of in-house developments with BASISplus software programming and no longer need to turn to outside companies for reliable SDI service. The database and its customized services are known as ACCESS (Argonne Current Contents Electronic Search Service). Through collaboration with librarians on Boolean logic and selection of terms, users can now design their own personal profiles to comb the new data, thereby avoiding service fees from outside providers. Based on the feedback from scientists, it seems that this new service can help transform the ANL distributed libraries into more efficient central functioning entities that better serve the users. One goal is to eliminate the routing of paper copies of many new journal issues to different library locations for users to browse; instead users may be expected to rely more on electronic dissemination of both table of contents and customized SDIs for new scientific and technical information.