Apologies for cross-posting
SOSIG (Social Science Information Gateway) has made some changes
to its interface.
Of particular interest to members of this list may be the cross
searching and cross browsing functionality with Biz/ed - the
Business and Economics Gateway. Biz/ed have been providing the
economics and business sections of SOSIG since 1996. Up until now
this has been achieved by storing copies of their templates
locally on the SOSIG database. However, SOSIG users can now search
and browse the live Biz/ed database seamlessly with the SOSIG
collection.
This is using version 2 of the ROADS software to implement the
cross searching functionality - an index (centroid) of the Bized
database is held locally on the SOSIG server and checked for
possible keyword matches before going to Bized to carry out the
query and integrate the results with hits from SOSIG.
To see an example of this trying searching for the term
econometrics from the SOSIG Search page - this will bring back
results from SOSIG and Bized (the origin of the descriptions is
shown by displaying an icon in the top left hand corner of the
record).
Other changes to the service include:
Browsing and searching by resource type
Users can now choose to browse the subject listings by type of
resource as well as restrict their searches in this way e.g.
search for full text sociology journals or bibliographies of
women's research.
New social science Web index
The SOSIG Link Harvester Index is automatically generated from the
URLs in the SOSIG core catalogue providing a searchable
database of over 50,000 social science Web pages.
Updated Thesaurus
A new version of the SOSIG thesaurus has been added to the
service. The data is derived from the HASSET thesaurus, which is
developed at the Data Archive, University of Essex. The thesaurus
provides the ability to find alternative terms to search the SOSIG
catalogue. In addition, the new version allows you to 'drill down'
the thesaurus to see the hierarchy of term relationships and the
ability to 'explode' a search term to include all narrower terms
in the search results.
Introduction of subject user guides
The SOSIG Section Editors have provided introductory tours of the
Internet to people who want to learn how to use the Internet to
support work in the social sciences and who want to identify some
of the most important Internet sites in their field. These are
available in HTML or in RTF and Word for downloading and printing
locally.
You can access SOSIG at:
http://www.sosig.ac.uk/
Feedback on the site and the new features is welcome.
--
Debra Hiom
Institute for Learning and Research Technology
University of Bristol
8-10 Berkeley, Bristol BS8 1HH
Tel: +44 (0)117 928 7117 (direct)
Fax: +44 (0)117 928 7112
http://www.sosig.ac.uk/
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