NOTEWORTHY NEW
ELECTRONIC RESOURCES

     During the past year, the Library’s collection of online databases has rapidly expanded.  CSUDH was the first CSU Library to subscribe to Academic Search Premier (ASP), a database that serves the Library’s basic goal to supply scholarly articles in a broad range of subject disciplines.  ASP is the largest scholarly, multi-disciplinary, full-text database designed specifically for academic libraries.  It provides indexing and abstracts for over 4,250 scholarly journals, with full-text available for 3,288 of these titles.  Subject areas include the social sciences, humanities, education, computer sciences,  language and linguistics, arts and literature, medical sciences, and more.  For many students, this database has been a good, basic database for beginning research projects.

Students often ask for peer-reviewed articles, and ASP enables users to search for peer-reviewed articles by simply checking the appropriate box.  Many articles are PDF files that provide full-page images of the original articles, while others are html-based articles often accompanied by images or graphics. 

Academic Search Premier is listed on the Library’s web pages at http://library.csudh.edu/electdb.php.  Clicking into the Academic Search Premier link brings up a menu of all CSUDH subscription and trial databases supplied through EBSCO.   One advantage of subscribing to ASP is the system of linkages to full-text articles.  When full-text journals are available on Academic Search Premier , they automatically become available  in professional databases such as BasicBIOSIS, PsycINFO, Sociological Abstracts, and SPORTDiscus,  Despite the budget crunch, the Library plans to add subject-oriented EBSCO databases of scholarly full-text articles which will also link to these professional citation databases.  Because the Library uses EBSCO as its subscription agent for print subscriptions, print subscriptions with electronic access not included in the ASP collections are also linked to citations found in the various databases.  From January 2000 through November 2001, the Library has supplied 83,845 full-text articles from the EBSCO family of databases to the CSUDH campus community.

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by Naomi Moy
nmoy@csudh.edu