Reference at Newman Library

Tag: Library and Information Science Source

Library Lit and LISTA Merged into New Database

If you go to the databases page or the list of reusable database links in LibGuides, you’ll no longer see a listing for Library Literature or for Library Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA) but instead just one for Library & Information Science Source. When EBSCO acquired H.W. Wilson last year, it was announced that overlapping products would be merged into new, larger databases. Those mergers are now finally rolling out this month.

Any permalinks you’ve bookmarked or put on web pages will still take you to the right record in the old databases; it’s likely that at some point in the future, EBSCO will automatically redirect you from any old permalinks to the same record in the new database.

Wilson Databases All Moved to EBSCOhost

As of this week, all of the Wilson databases we had access to on the WilsonWeb platform have moved over to EBSCOhost. Links to these databases have been updated on the library’s databases page and on the LibGuides Reusable Links page. With this move, there are some notable benefits to searchers.

Greater integration with full text

Many article records in WilsonWeb relied on SFX to get you to the full text; now, the records are right within EBSCOhost, which offers a vast trove of full text content. So we’ll see fewer SFX links in Wilson databases than we used to and more direct links to text.

Additional retrospective databases

After the merger, EBSCO gave us access to a bunch of retrospective databases we didn’t have before. Rather than add each one to our databases page as a separate listing, we’ve created a listing in the database that takes you to a page that lets you search the retrospective and the full text editions at the same time. These are the new retrospective indexes we now have:

  • Applied Science & Technology Index Retrospective: 1913-1983
  • Biography Index Retrospective: 1946-1983
  • Education Index Retrospective: 1929-1983
  • Humanities Index Retrospective: 1907-1984
  • Library Literature & Information Science Retrospective: 1905-1983
  • Social Sciences Index Retrospective: 1929-1983

Ability to search a huge set of databases at once

EBSCO has long offered a nice way to search all their databases at once. With all the new Wilson databases that are part of the platform now, that list of databases that could be searched simultaneously is quite large.

Now that all the Wilson databases are available on the EBSCOhost platform, the next step from EBSCO will be merge some of the similar Wilson and EBSCO databases into one project. This post from InfoDocket last summer shows what database mergers may take place.