Midwinter ALA Documents from the Brown Bag

MLA SearchOff Evaluation Checklist – ALA MidWinter 2005

Vendor/Platform ________________________

I)  Dissertation Abstracts.

_____1) Can dissertations be included in / limited to / excluded from the results?

_____2) Can you link to Library’s holdings for the dissertation NOT to Dissertation Abstracts?

_____3) Can you link to Digital Dissertations?

II) Chapters in Books.

_____ 1) Can book chapters be included in / limited to / excluded in the results?

_____ 2) Identify the book elements needed to find the chapter in the brief citation display?

_____ 3) Identify the book elements needed to find chapter in the full display?

_____ 4) Can you link to Library’s holdings?

III) Thesaurus/Controlled Subject Headings for LITERARY topics

_____1) Does the vendor present a meaningful and useful display of subject headings?

_____2) Does the vendor provide a way to search for terms inside the subject headings?

_____3) Deal with the categorical nature of most terms used in MLA, e.g. “1900-1999”, “Novels”, etc.

_____4) Assist the user in dealing with the ‘identifier-type’ terms, “relations with XYZ”,“treatment of ZBX”, “compared to ABC”, etc.

IV) Indexing Fields

_____1) Does the vendor include enough indexed fields?

_____2) Is there a separate, browseable display of each indexed field and sub-field, e.g. GENRE?

V) Peer reviewed Journals

_____1) Does the vendor allow the user to limit to peer-reviewed journals?

VI) How does the vendor treat these tightly-bound, identifier-type subject headings to allow a patron
to search more effectively for persons or works within them, e.g.  R(obert) Crumb, as in:

1) Mairowitz, David Zane [1943- ] and Crumb, Robert [1943- ]

2) treatment in Mairowitz, David Zane [1943- ] and Crumb, Robert [1943- ]: Introducing Kafka

VII) How does the vendor deal with particles in foreign languages which happen to be field labels?

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		University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library Gateway Homepage Comments to:Lisa German Updated on: 2/02/05