[69] in Information Retrieval
An odyssey through online libraries.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Thu Mar 5 20:26:24 1992
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 1992 20:25:32 -0500 (EST)
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@Athena.MIT.EDU>
To: elibdev@Athena.MIT.EDU
I hope you will find this amusing. I'm coming up to speed on using the
library both online and physically. I've not used the library in YEARS,
and it shows...
At the Tulip Meeting a couple weeks ago, I mentioned that I thought I
knew of an article which would help us learn about the issue of trading
off grey scale images of texts against resolution on the screen.
Since I couldn't find the article handily in my office, or at home, I
asked one of the authors I know who wrote an article in a related area,
readibility of CRT screens. Alas, the bibleography he gave me was not
sufficient.
So, I decided to try the plethora of online sources with the following results:
I used the library menus in Dash to connect to Barton, but I really
couldn't get my search narrowed enough, and each screenful took so long
that I quickly gave up.
I used Mitchell Charity's reading-room.lcs.mit.edu, but the database
wasn't sufficiently fleshed out for me to find what I wanted. This
inspired me to try MELVYL. (After all, Clifford probably has EVERYTHING
online.)
MELVYL wouldn't let me access the relevant database because I don't have
a valid Berkeley User ID.
So I went, in person, to Barker Engineering library and hunted up the
physical texts belonging to the bibleography I originally got from my
friend. By scanning the paper index to the first 20 volumes of the
journal referred to by my friend, I hit on the idea that "DISPLAY" would
be a good keyword, so I decided to give Barton another try.
I sat down at one of the PC's in Barker, but the first one I tried,
alleging to be a connection to GEAC was hung. The second one gave me
thousands of entries on my keyword DISPLAY. I found two mechanical
engineering theses that almost looked relevant until I discovered they
were for telesensory displays for MIT's robot submarine.
I came back to my office and used my CMU account to use their Mercury
system. Because I had a relevant CMU identity, I could search INSPEC,
which produced three relevant documents, one of which was by an author
referred to by my friend.
Now I have gone back to reading-room.lcs.mit.edu, and found reference to
one of the 3 documents. But the only way I knew the document was
relevant was that CMU had troubled to type in the abstracts. I could
not find the other two, (one of which was done by someone in the MIT
Architecture Machine Group!) in any of the 3 databases we currently have.
What I learn from this is that, although Mercury is not well regarded,
even by its developers, it has merit. The merit comes from having many
databases available and being able to search on multiple keywords.
I believe that my work learning about BRS/Search enabled me to
understand a little more about searching a text database than the
average student, so I could initiate a search in Mercury: "character
adj display and resolution" and get many texts with high percentage of
relevance.
I am also remembering how clueless I am about using the library.
Now all I have to do is find out how to get access to the actual texts:
CHI + GI 1987 Conference: Human Factors in Computing Systems
and Graphics Interface; Toronto, Ont., Canada; 5-9 April 1987;
[I think MIT has this one somewhere]
Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 31st Annual Meeting:
Rising to New Heights with Technology; New York, NY, USA; 19-
23 Oct. 1987;
Proc. S.I.D. (USA); vol.30, no.1; 1989; pp. 23-8
[I wonder what S.I.D is...]
Stay tuned for "An odyssey through interlibrary loan" :-)
-wdc
