Dear MLA Search Off Teams,

My plan is to have the librarian / vendor team work together in advance of MidWinter and share information and questions and work out a demonstration that will show the discussion group how that interface/vendor dealt with the tricky issues of the MLA database. Because most everybody in the room will be able to do simple searches on any vendor's platform, sight unseen, I want the presentations to go beyond the "Sales Demo" and delve deep into the database structure-interface interaction.

I am sharing the list of questions/issues ahead of time because sometimes the answers to on-the-surface easy questions turn out to be quite complex technically. I wanted each vendor team member to be able to consult with their techies in preparation for the demos. This way there won't be the "Gotcha" factor when one of us asks a question such as, "How does Vendor X deal with particles in foreign languages which happen to be field labels." Because these questions can be a potential landmine and/or quagmire, in the interests of fairness, we want the vendor to be able to show us how to work around it.

If any of the team members know of other issues which should be included in the list of topics to consider, again, please send it to me and I will forward to the list.  The more topics we have in advance, the better each team will be able to explore and prepare.

Each vendor will have the opportunity to impress us with how they deal with both the run of the mill, "I need 5 scholarly articles on Jane Austen" questions as well as the kinds of questions posed by our faculty that make us use every square inch of our resourcefulness and tricks of the trade.

An example of the kind of deep knowledge we are hoping to get in the presentations at MidWinter is suggested by my questions on fields and subfields.   For example, the subfield descriptor GENRE is highly useful (nay, required) in searching for material dealing with a type of literature, e.g. novels.  Because MLA gives the descriptor "novel" to all records about individual novels, you cannot use the keyword or subject heading novel to find these genre-related items. You need the subfield descriptor.

 I)  Dissertation Abstracts.

How does the vendor

1)         Exclude dissertations from the results?

2)         Limit retrieval to dissertations?

3)         Provide a way to search dissertations and other document types

4)         Link to Library’s holdings for the dissertation NOT to Dissertation Abstracts?

5)         Link to Digital Dissertations?

II) Chapters in Books.

How does the vendor

1)         Exclude book chapters from the results?

2)         Limit retrieval to book chapters?

3)         Provide a way to search book chapters and other document types?

4)         Identify the book elements needed to find the chapter in the brief citation display t?

5)         Identify the chapter in the full display, particularly the book elements needed to find the item?

6)         Link to Library’s holdings?

III) Thesaurus/Controlled Subject Headings for LITERARY topics

How does the vendor

1)         Present a meaningful and useful display of terms?

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

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

IV) Indexing Fields

How does the vendor deal with fields?

1)         Which fields does the vendor index?

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

V) Peer reviewed Journals

How does the vendor

1)         Allow the user to limit to peer-reviewed journals?

In addition, I have selected a sample citation's subject headings list.  

These subject headings are attached to an item about Crumb and Kafka.  Each of the parts enclosed in parentheses are searched as a unit in OVID, with results selectively displayed below.  I want to explore how each vendor would treat these subject headings to allow a patron to search more effectively for R(obert) Crumb.

Subject Headings (American literature) -- (1900-1999) -- (Mairowitz, David Zane [1943- ] and Crumb, Robert [1943- ]) -- (Introducing Kafka [1994]) -- (biography) -- (treatment of Kafka, Franz [1883-1924]) -- (NEW)