InfoTrac and the Man with No Pants

[Wing, Robert]

On Friday, 27 Aug 1999, Dan Ream wrote:
> Topic No. 12

> Yesterday while showing our entering freshmen the wonders of InfoTrac
> Expanded Academic ASAP during orientation, we did a keyword search for
>       rap music and violen*

> Theories or explanations, anyone??

> --Dan Ream
>  Virginia Commonwealth University Library
>  Richmond, Virginia

The photo that comes up when you do a keyword search in InfoTrac for "rap
music and violen*" is from the periodical "Men's Health" June 1999 v14 i5
p74.
I agree with Elizabeth McKenty's thought that while possible, this was
probably not a case of an employee having "fun." 
My theory is that there is not very good quality control within the database
and/or technical problems at Galenet where they get their "wires crossed."
At my library, we have many instances where strange things happen while
searching InfoTrac also. 
Some of the errors we experience are:
"We're sorry!... InfoTrac server is down... Please start a new session"
"Lost connection to InfoTrac server"
"Record data not available"
"Record #A17165615 is not accessible at this time" (various records, not
only this one)
"We're sorry!... No page 16 recorded in your session"
"Sorry... Cannot find specified segment"
Also, and most bizarre, different number of citations listed for the same
search, even though the searches were performed on the same day, one right
after the other (no typos!)
Has anyone else gotten these types of messages on a frequent basis? We get a
combination of several of these messages each day, and can't determine a
pattern. The most frequently occurring message is the one that indicates the
"InfoTrac server" is down, but the computer right next to the one giving the
message often has no problem.
Tech support has been notified and is unable to figure out what is going on.
The problems are sometimes so frequent and frustrating that some of the
librarians here are thinking about canceling InfoTrac and replacing it with
another database from different vendor. 
Can anyone recommend a fulltext periodical database which does not have so
many glitches... Wilson, EBSCO, UMI, etc? Any comments would be appreciated.
I might add that we use "InfoTrac Custom" where we choose the periodical
titles in the database, as opposed to something like Academic Index/ASAP
which uses a set list of titles, but tech support doesn't think this should
make a difference. We also don't think it is a local problem with our
network connection because we have several other web-based databases,
including another Galenet database, that we don't have problems with and we
have also done pings and trace routes and these haven't indicated anything
unusual.
Anyone have any ideas? 
TIA

Robert Wing
Librarian
San Jose City College
2100 Moorpark Ave.
San Jose, CA 95128-2799
408-298-2181, ext.3945
email: robert.wing at sjeccd.cc.ca.us