For the past two years the UB community has had access to FirstSearch, an outstanding search system that includes: WorldCat (the world's largest and most comprehensive source of information about books, serial titles, sound recordings, manuscripts, etc.), ArticleFirst (indexing of journals) ContentsFirst (table of contents service), ERIC (education), GPO (government documents) and Medline (medicine).

Now FirstSearch offers two additional databases of interest to researchers: Proceedings First and PapersFirst. ProceedingsFirst provides a listing of publications from worldwide conferences, meetings, workshops, congresses, etc. In ProceedingsFirst you can search by conference name, date, location, or subject. Conference proceedings identified through FirstSearch and not listed in BISON (UB's online catalog) can be obtained via interlibrary loan.

Many people are less interested in determining what conferences have published proceedings than in identifying actual papers presented at meetings worldwide. PapersFirst lists over 580,000 conference papers on a huge range of topics from Shakespeare to urban planning to DNA to linguistics. You can search by author, title, subject, and conference name. To determine if the papers identified are available in the University Libraries, type the source name in BISON's "UB Libraries Catalog." If it is not listed, you may submit an interlibrary loan request.

To connect to FirstSearch log on to your campus E-mail account and at your system prompt type: wings. Select "Libraries," then "Online Resources," then "General Indexes and Library Catalogs," then "FirstSearch." For information on connecting to UB Wings call the Computing Center Help Desk at 645-3542. For questions regarding FirstSearch, contact Don Hartman unldon@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu, Lockwood Library, 645-2817.

-Gemma DeVinney and Don Hartman, University Libraries