Friday, February 6, 2009

Fulltext Sources Online

Fulltext Sources Online is a two volume publication that is updated twice per year (We keep it behind the reference desk). It costs $285 per year.

We just received the new edition, and the July edition, which it replaces, looks untouched by human hands. Whenever I see this, of course, I question whether we should be getting it.

It lists 41,234 publications whose full text can be found in 25 aggregators (like Ebsco, Factiva, JSTOR, Newsbank, etc). It is arranged alphabetically by title of publication, with subject, geographic and language indexes.

Significantly, 36,417 of the entries include URLs, and of these 13,035 contain free archives. This is noted by a special symbol within the entry. Blogs, radio programs, TV transcripts and newsletters are also included and noted as such in the entry as a document type.

Definitely this is a useful resource. But do we get asked for this kind of information enough to justify the price, or do most patrons want to know what we have access to here in the library (which can quickly be answered by our E-Journal magazine list which can be found here http://nc9gr8gh9t.search.serialssolutions.com/ ).