Thursday, July 21, 2005

New Harvard resource: E-Research@Harvard Libraries

Users of Hollis and Harvard Libraries online have a new resource to search electronic databases, journals, and catalogs .... E-Research@Harvard Libraries. Here's the official intro:

Welcome to E-Research @ Harvard Libraries. Here you can identify, locate, and connect to Harvard's growing collection of e-resources and e-journals. You can also use new tools that allow you to search multiple resources at one time and to save sets of e-resources, e-journals, and citations.



I've given it a spin, and I have to say that the user interface is not intuitive. For instance, Quick Search is not available as a text field on every screen; rather you have to return "home" to use it. Also, the results it returns are not isolated to electronic resources ... for instance, a simple search I performed (Chinese media) yields lots of results in the ordinary Hollis catalog (books) and nothing in electronic journal articles. Also, there are links to other resources in the search results, but the data from the original search are not carried over if you click on the link. On the other hand, I didn't read the tutorial or help pages, so my opinions should be viewed as uninformed.

Harvard students with an ID and PIN can log in and try it themselves.

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