Electronic Highways:
On Track with InfoTrac

The General Reference Center presents a new concept in database searching: not only does it provide full text articles in general interest magazines such as Time, New Republic, The Nation and Harper's, it gives access to full text Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service articles and full-text reference books such as Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of Literature and the Columbia Encyclopedia. For example, doing a search on Frank Lloyd Wright leads you to one encyclopedia excerpt, three reference book excerpts, 36 newspaper references, and 66 periodical references (of which 22 are full-text articles).

The Expanded Academic Index is a more scholarly Humanities/Social Science/General Science/Current Events database that provides access to full-text articles from over 600 journals such as CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Educational Leadership, Foreign Affairs, International Journal of Comparative Sociology and the Journal of Comparative Family Studies. EAI provides citations and abstracts for an additional 900 periodicals and citations to the most recent six months of The New York Times.

The Business Index covers virtually every aspect of business including management techniques, economic conditions, companies, products and industries and provides indexing, and in many instances full-test articles, from approximately 800 general business magazines, trade journals, scholarly journals. The Knight-Ridder/Tribune business news wire is included as well as selected coverage from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

The National Newspaper Index provides in-depth indexing to five prominent newspapers: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. The University Libraries subscribes to all five of these newspapers.

LegalTrac provides indexing of approximately 900 legal periodicals including legal newspapers, law reviews and trade journals as well as selected indexing from non-legal periodicals on legal topics. Although you can do a standard keyword boolean search in LegalTrac, you also have the option of searching the subject index by case or statute name.

All InfoTrac SearchBank databases are updated at least weekly and some are updated daily. The databases are searchable on the new BISON II workstations being installed in each library unit on campus. Members of the university community have access to InfoTrac from home provided they dial in through their UB e-mail account and connect to the Internet using lynx or a graphical browser such as Netscape. (The URL is http://www.searchbank.com/searchbank/sunybuff_main). For information on dialing in, contact the Computing Center Help Desk at 645-3542. For information on InfoTrac SearchBank, contact Mike Lavin (mrlavin@acsu.buffalo.edu), Lockwood Library, 645-6211.

-Gemma DeVinney and Don Hartman, University Libraries