[WEB4LIB] Re: What about a non-full-text limiter?

[Walt_Crawford at notes.rlg.org]

Hi Lars,

It has certainly changed for some disciplines, at least for journal
articles (as opposed to books).

I do test runs to see how OpenURL resolvers work with 16 databases
supported in Eureka, our end-user search system, including 13
primarily-article databases. While I only look at two searches and 30 or 50
items per search, it's still a fairly broad test.

>From what I can see, the majority of recent cited articles in anthropology
are available in full text (some institutions show as high as 70% for our
anthropology databases), and I'd guess this is true of most sciences.

I believe that something like 11,000 refereed science/technology/medicine
(STM) journals are available in full text (as are thousands of other
periodicals); that's a majority of all refereed STM journals (a large
majority by most estimates of the total population).

Even for areas where full text is more difficult (e.g., art and
architecture), I'm seeing as high as 30%-40% full text yield--and, for that
matter, in two of our databases that are either humanities/social sciences
or general-interest, I see as high as 75%-80% full-text yield for searches
involving recent material.

[I'm not touting our services in this case, because Brian's question would
be irrelevant: We don't host any of the full text, but OpenURL makes it
easy for libraries to combine our professional indexes and the full-text
resources they're already paying for.]

Cheers,
walt crawford, RLG (speaking on my own behalf but with the background of
testing more than 100 OpenURL configurations)


                                                                                                                                       
                                                                                                                                       
                                                                                                                                       




Brian Mathews wrote:
> I wish that database vendors included a non-full-text limiter. Sure,
> it is strategic to have the ability to filter your results for
> full-text only, but what if you wanted a list of items that are not
> available online?

Was there yet a realistic case where any query yielded a significantly
smaller list of results if the online available texts were left out?
What science and which query?

Your wish sounds like a catalog of the books that aren't written yet,
or going to Africa's jungles to find all animals that aren't there.
This is because I have the preconceived notion that so very little
information is available online.  Maybe one day that will not be so.
Maybe it has already changed for some disciplines?


--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik