May 15, 2011 REFERENCE
reviews
By Cheryl LaGuardia
CRCNETBASE 2.0 CRC Press, www.crcnetbase.com ●●●●●●●●●●
CONTENT CRCnetBASE 2.0 is the
ONTHEWEB
major new release of the CRCnetBASE platform, first launched in 1999. It offers online access to more than 6000 e-reference books and handbooks in over 40 disciplines, ranging from agriculture to water sciences (for this review, I had access to the BUSINESSnetBASE, ECONOMICSnetBASE, MILITARYnetBASE, ProjectMANAGEMENTnetBASE, PublicADMINISTRATIONnetBASE, and SCI-TECHnetBASE collections). Content includes ebooks published by CRC Press, Auerbach Publications, and Chapman & Hall, all part of the Taylor & Francis Group. USABILITY CRCnetBASE 2.0’s main screen has a title banner at top with a Don’t miss Cheryl LaGuardia’s LJ blog, E-views, for her up-to-theminute takes on electronic reference. Only at www.libraryjournal.com
simple search box at screen right and a link to Advanced Search (also in the title banner is a box I could check for Full Access Content Only; CRC recently upgraded the system to make it possible to choose what users see upon logging in, such as whether users see only browse categories and subcategories that contain full-access content or receive only search results with full-access rights). Beneath the banner is a toolbar with button links to Home, Browse Content, Advanced Search, About CRCnetBASE, Subject Collections, How to Subscribe, Librarian Resources, News & Events, and Free Trial. Most of the real estate on the main screen is occupied by links to browse the categories within each subject collection (two-thirds, screen left) and subscription and social networking links (one-third, screen right). I decided to start browsing. I clicked on the link to the Forensics and Criminal Justice collection, which promptly expanded into a sublist: Arson & Fire Investigation (five), Computer Crime Investigation (eight), Criminal Justice & Law (78), Forensic Pathology (36), Forensics (196), and Law Enforcement (146); to the right is an alphabetical list of 314 books in the collection. I scanned
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some titles there, and when I got to Bitter Nemesis: The Intimate History of Strychnine, I had to take a closer look. The title link whisked me to a new page with an image of the book’s cover and citation information, both abutting a linked Table of Contents. In conjunction with check boxes next to each chapter, global options include Download to Citation Manager, View Abstracts, Add to Bookshelf, and Email. Right away, a chapter titled “Perfidious Dutchmen Bark Up the Wrong Tree” jumped out at me, as did the links to an Abstract, a High Res PDF (best for documents with images), and a PDF (with links to referenced citations) for each chapter on the page. I chose the last of these, and within a second or two, I had the PDF of the chapter in front of me. That’s when I got a good view of how the new platform works. The first page of the chapter displayed in a window in the lower right of the screen. Surrounding the frame are Adobe’s PDF action and navigational links, such as save a copy, print, email, show next page, go to a specific page, zoom in/out, as well as links to share and/or comment on the document (options will depend on the version of Adobe browser plug-in). To the immediate left of the page are buttons to let you look at page thumbnails (if you want to scan quickly through the text), a Bookmarking button, and a button that opens a search box so you can search the text. I downloaded the chapter (a breeze), added it to My Bookshelf (one click from there, and I went right to the chapter), and emailed it to myself effortlessly. The Advanced Search page is likewise well crafted: the search fields—full text, book/chapter titles, author (by chapter), and ISBN/DOI—appear next to a very large “Tips for Using Advanced Search” section and just above a publication date limiter followed by a list of subjects in the collections (you can choose to Select All or Clear All with a single click, or choose to search only the collections you check off). The tips provided are probably the clearest I’ve ever come across—they even include this reminder: “To search content to which you subscribe, make sure you have checked the full access content only box.” So I did an Advanced Search of full text for “arid lands” and got 2,513 results, which I was quickly able to sort by
Relevancy, Publication Date, Author, or Titles A-Z. When I sorted the results by publication date, the first hit was for a 2011 book by Acharya Deepak and Mahendra Rai, Ethnomedicinal Plants, while the earliest was for The Living Economy, edited by Paul Ekins and published by Routledge in 1986. Subsequent searches (for bionanoparticles, dosimetry, polarimetric imaging, bacterial consorms, Cepheid variables, and more) revealed the rich content in the file, all made easily available. The speed is phenomenal, as are the navigational features and capabilities. The content will depend on the collections to which you subscribe, but the quality here was superb for all the collections I was able to access. The only potential hitch I encountered was not being able to go back to the original page view once I selected Read Mode in the Adobe document viewer because the toolbar at the top of the frame disappears. I liked Read Mode a lot—it is as close to a full-page reader as I’ve seen in an electronic reference platform—but I did want to have that toolbar accessible again (turns out the Esc key exits Read Mode, though this is far from obvious). PRICING The cost of some individual collections starts at $995, with overall pricing based on such factors as limited or unlimited access, number of concurrent users, and the type and number of subject collections and publication years involved. BOTTOM LINE CRCnetBASE 2.0 earns an overall ten. Highly recommended for all libraries serving serious scientific researchers. For a free trial, go to www. crcnetbase.com/page/free_trial. Cheryl LaGuardia is the Research Librarian for the Widener Library at Harvard University and author of Becoming a Library Teacher (Neal-Schuman, 2000). Readers and producers can contact her at claguard@fas.harvard.edu
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