from Inquiry, Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 1997, 72-75
© Copyright 1997 Virginia Community College System
Abstract
The resources available at the
Virtual Library of Virginia Web site are reviewed .
It is the fall season. The leaves are changing and the beautiful mountains of Virginia are beckoning all those who would venture out of their safe four walls. Why not take the opportunity to join us for an adventurous trip down the Information Super Highway?
We all have different objectives as we travel. Some of us like to follow our instincts and see where different roads may lead us. Others are planners, investigating the various routes and contacting agencies in advance of our travel. Then there are those of us who are most comfortable when we plan our trips around visits with old friends. Our trip down the Information Super Highway can take any of these approaches. In fact, for maximum benefit to us, we will want to utilize all of the methods at our disposal to make our trip both enjoyable and educational.
If we decide to take the Blue Ridge Parkway which meanders through the mountains, offers us a variety of stops, gives us plenty of opportunities to explore the unknown areas surrounding it, and does not make any demands on our time, we are doing the equivalent of a general Internet search. This trip is available by clicking on Net Search or Net Directory on the Netscape button bar. The variety of not-so-historical markers we encounter, such as Alta Vista, Infoseek, Lycos, Excite, Webcrawler, and Yahoo will provide you with much information. You will be given sources which are well documented and carefully researched.
Thrown in among them will be other resources which are not so dependable. Road signs will have been erected by the passersby and property owners which may or may not be useful to you as you go along. You and those traveling with you are the ones who will be responsible for determining the value of these discoveries.
Perhaps you have a specific goal in mind for your final destination. You know you want to experience a lovely drive and spend the weekend at the Martha Washington Inn in Abingdon at the peak of the color. You know where you are going and which roads you need to access to arrive there. When you are on the Information Super Highway and you know the address of your destination, you can enter this information by clicking on the “open” pull-down menu or by typing the address directly into the Location bar on your screen. Unfortunately, with this method you must know exactly where you want to go as there will be no one along the way who can help you find your final destination if the address you have is in error.
Instead, on this trip we will not be heading out alone into the unknown. We have friends along the way who can help us sort out the variety of experiences so that we can find the information quickly. We can gain access to private property and know that the owner has gone to great lengths to maintain the suitability of the site for our purposes. We can visit others who have had more opportunities to explore than we and are willing to share what they have found. We are also able to retrieve the data that we find and take it back to our own homes to use it over and over again.
One of the very good friends that we will visit is the Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA). VIVA is a consortium of the libraries of the 39 state-assisted colleges and universities (at 52 campuses) within the Commonwealth of Virginia, including six doctoral universities, nine comprehensive institutions, and 24 community and two-year branch colleges. In addition, 28 private institutions also participate. VIVA's mission is to provide, in an equitable, cooperative and cost effective manner, enhanced access to library and information resources for the Commonwealth of Virginia's academic libraries serving the higher education community. Financial benefits include cooperative purchasing for as little as thirteen percent of the list price for individual institutional purchases of VIVA resources. As of January 1997, VIVA has recorded savings of $13.7 million over what would have been spent had all public institutions purchased the VIVA materials independently. VIVA has done much to eliminate educational disparity among the various institutions in Virginia. It can be accessed from computers anywhere on campus - faculty offices, computer labs, libraries. Through access to VIVA we will be able to stop at the homes of many of our friends and determine what we can use to take back with us.
In many cases some of us can begin from our own home page and travel a pre-programmed VIVA route to make our discoveries. At Southwest Virginia Community College, users click on the library book icon at the bottom of their home page and then select VIVA as their next option. Others may need to access VIVA directly by typing in the address at the Location bar on Netscape (http://www.viva.lib.va.us). Whichever method we use, we will all be meeting at and leaving from the same location. From the VIVA home page we are able to choose whichever old friend we plan to visit. Since our interest in the fall color of Virginia has motivated us to begin our exploration, we might take the time to learn more about the seasons and how they have impacted the science, history and literature of our state.
Initially we will discover what is available to us from the VIVA home page. We are able to access library holdings from across the state as well as others from the “libraries” hot spot or link. If we are interested in searching across the Internet, we can click on “search tools” and end up back on the Blue Ridge Parkway method. However, visiting our old friends will require that we click on “collections.”
Behind this button we will find electronic versions of many of the paper tools we have known from our past. FirstSearch, a product of the Online Computer Library Center, Inc., houses 59 available databases for us to peruse. Included among them is WorldCat, OCLC's online book catalog for materials contained in libraries throughout the world. The H. W. Wilson indexes – Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, Humanities, Social Science, Applied Science and Technology, Education, and Business Periodicals — are also here with abstracts of the various articles which are indexed to make your visit a more profitable one. Disclosure and Worldscope (which include financial reports on various companies), Environment (which contains aspects of the environmental sciences), and ERIC (which is the standard in education literature) are here as well. In addition, Periodicals Contents Index (PCI Web) contains thousands of periodicals in the humanities and social sciences. Cambridge Scientific Abstracts and MathSciNet also have a locator from the “collections” screen. Cambridge Scientific Abstracts includes citations and abstracts from thirty-nine scientific and technical databases. MathSciNet contains Math Reviews and Current Math Publications, published by the American Math Society. With this database we can simultaneously search over all the articles in Math Review and Current Math Publications from 1940 to the present. This myriad of tried and true friends offers us a plethora of available resources.
Knowledge of Boolean logic will help to make our trip more enjoyable. Many of the home pages we will visit from the “collections” button require a basic ability to use Boolean logic in searching. We can use “and” to narrow a search, “or” to broaden a search, and “not” to eliminate any unwanted terms from our search results. The ability to join key words together in well planned ways will enable us to construct search strategies that the computer can understand. Boolean logic, truncation, and nesting allow us to communicate to the computer which information, specifically, we are seeking. We can use Boolean logic to keep our CB radios tuned in to information of vital importance.
Whereas some of our stops have allowed us to stand on the mountain top and view citations and abstracts to see everything available to us from that area, we can also visit homes where we can actually go onto the property and dig up treasures to take back with us. Searchbank, the host for Information Access Company (IAC), arranges its data into five groups. Books in Print, Computer Database, Expanded Academic Index, General BusinessFILE, and Health Reference Center Expanded have many items which are available in full-text and retrievable directly from the screen. IDEAL, the full-text version of the publications from Academic Press, and Project Muse, Johns Hopkins Press on-line, increase our immediate access to scholarly information. Britannica Online includes the old standby Britannica Encyclopaedia in its entirety with accompanying yearbooks and updates. Galenet is an online proprietary subscription service which showcases the unique products of Gale Research, the publisher of many print sources available in libraries in the past. Examples of these resources include Associations Unlimited, Biography and Genealogy Master Index, Contemporary Authors, and Research Centers and Services Directories. Many of these full-text treasures can not only be printed directly from the computer screen, but can be e-mailed to our loved ones as souvenirs.
The VIVA home page is maintained by John Duke at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is constantly upgrading the links so that information is easily accessible to end users. Whenever we forget the address of an old friend or have limited time and energy to be creative searchers, we can count on the VIVA home page to provide us with access to the latest information available to researchers in the Commonwealth of Virginia. As we return to our base of operation, we are awed by where we have been and the vast array of what we have seen, and yet, we know that we will want to go back again and again.
Grace Boyce is a part-time Reference Librarian at Virginia Highlands Community College. Diane Carr is Information Services Librarian at Southwest Virginia Community College. They co-presented a poster session on the Virtual Library of Virginia at the 1997 New Horizons Conference and are firm believers in the power of VIVA.