DATABASES: DATABANKS AND SEARCH SERVICE PROVIDERS :
DATABASE: SEARCHING TECHNIQUES:
EBSCO: Customer Service Past and Present and Learning Better Ways to Use
EBSCO


The EBSCO database searching system has been a relatively recent addition
to the databanks available to database consumers for accessing a number of
important and widely used databases. From the inception of availability
to me of this databank, first through public library provision of these
databases and more recently, a number of years ago the use of this system
in academic library database access. From the beginning I had problems
with the way this system worked and in those early years could not get any
explanations or movement to change from the EBSCO customer service
representatives at the time I called when EBSCO was new to us.

The version of EBSCO we have used, I now have learned there are various
versions of EBSCO interfaces, has a starting web page that shows a series
of boxes and the option of using these boxes to combine various words in
each or phrases with Boolean operators. I have been using this interface
and having many problems with search combinations such as wanting words or
phrases to be found in both in subject heading and title when placing the
entire search in one of these boxes.

Recently, without mentioning the system involved, I posted the following
message to a specialized discussion group:

------------------------------------------------------

This search was conducted in a databank commonly used by medical
institutions and libraries for medical searching and soon, I suspect to be
more. The search has been repeated over a period of time. Proper
positional operators were employed in the search to maintain the word
order used and the final step was a combination of two steps with the and
boolean operator. Truncation was not employed as this system and another
that I commonly use do not handle truncation well in my experience.

Step One

(gay marriage) or (gay marriages)
Result 1869

Step Two

Limit step one to title
Result 541

Step Three

Limit step one to subject
Result 25

Step Four

Combine step two and three with the Boolean operator and
Result 320

This combination was made using the appropriate step symbol before the
step number for each of the two steps combined.

I will appreciate any explanations regarding what I may be doing
incorrectly.

------------------------------------------------------

I was very frustrated and not expecting much to happen. I was dead wrong.
One respondent wanted to know which system was being exemplified and I
told this respondent privately that it was EBSCO and received the return
advice that I contact them, this due to past experiences was not one of my
primary choices. It, however, did not have to be. Things at EBSCO seem
to have changed. I posted this message in the early morning and around
four o'clock the same day, even though my post did not mention EBSCO, I
got a telephone call from them.

Christopher Terlizzi of EBSCO asked if I was David Dillard and then
proceeded to find what my problems were, what interface I was using in
great detail including details about how our server reached EBSCO.
Christopher told me he needed to investigate the problem and spent about
six hours on it before calling me back the next day.

The reason I am sharing all of this is because there are better ways of
accessing EBSCO that will prevent the need to use very bit by bit
searching in the dialog boxes with drop down menus version of EBSCO.

Indeed I heard the next day about another EBSCO search interface and tried
it and found that it solved most of my searching problems. Unknown to me
and I suspect others in the box with drop down menus interface, one cannot
enter parentheses or Boolean operators (and, or, not) in the search
statement without combination problems down the road in future related
search steps, like finding more documents that are in both step A and in
step B in a search asking that the document be in both A and B than are
found in A by itself or in B by itself as in the search example above.

The solution is the EBSCO find line search. But one nagging problem
remained, frequently, particularly in searches using multiple databases,
the subject search of words and phrases produced a null result. Title
searching was fine.

Title search

ti (books or magazines or publications or (reading w1 materials)

produced an appropriate result.

su (books or magazines or publications or (reading w1 materials)

The solution was that su needed to be distributed as a field limiter in
front of every word or phrase, unlike the title limitation.

Consider these search steps which in EBSCO put the most recent search step
at the top.

S4
s2 and s3
Interface - EBSCOhost
Search Screen - Advanced
Database - Academic Search Premier; Book Review Digest; ERIC; Library
Literature & Information Science; Library, Information Science &
Technology Abstracts; MLA International Bibliography; General Science
Abstracts; PsycARTICLES; PsycINFO; Education Abstracts; Humanities
Abstracts; ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials; SPORTDiscus

353520 Revise


S3 (su social or su sociology or su political or su history or su
historical or su religion or su science or (su social w1 science*))

Interface - EBSCOhost
Search Screen - Advanced
Database - Academic Search Premier; Book Review Digest; ERIC; Library
Literature & Information Science; Library, Information Science &
Technology Abstracts; MLA International Bibliography; General Science
Abstracts; PsycARTICLES; PsycINFO; Education Abstracts; Humanities
Abstracts; ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials; SPORTDiscus 1741775
Revise

S2 ti (social or sociology or political or history or historical or
religion or science or (social w1 science*))

Interface - EBSCOhost
Search Screen - Advanced
Database - Academic Search Premier; Book Review Digest; ERIC; Library
Literature & Information Science; Library, Information Science &
Technology Abstracts; MLA International Bibliography; General Science
Abstracts; PsycARTICLES; PsycINFO; Education Abstracts; Humanities
Abstracts; ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials; SPORTDiscus 787916
Revise


S1 social or sociology or political or history or historical or religion
or science or (social w1 science*)

Interface - EBSCOhost
Search Screen - Advanced
Database - Academic Search Premier; Book Review Digest; ERIC; Library
Literature & Information Science; Library, Information Science &
Technology Abstracts; MLA International Bibliography; General Science
Abstracts; PsycARTICLES; PsycINFO; Education Abstracts; Humanities
Abstracts; ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials; SPORTDiscus 5245046
Revise


Problems uncovered by this most productive interaction with Christopher
included a much better version of the EBSCO interface than was
institutionally available to me
and some tools to use to make searching effective where expected search
techniques were not working. EBSCO
institutional subscribers who do not have the Find Line or
Guided Find Line search interfaces should look into making one or both of
these interfaces available to their users.

EBSCO
<http://www.ebsco.com/home/>

EBSCO Databases
<http://www.epnet.com/>

EBSCO Database List
<http://www.epnet.com/titleLists.php?topicID=
380&tabForward=titleLists&marketID=>

A shorter URL for the above link:

<http://snipurl.com/ngfe>

To say that I am a much happier camper in my use of EBSCO databases these
days is a very mild understatement. That I would like to see some of the
additional features found in services like OVID, CSA and DIALOG like the
ability to nest words and phrases on either or both sides of a positional
operator are matters I would like to see happen in the future to increase
my newly found ecstasy in using EBSCO with better results.

OVID
<http://www.ovid.com/site/index.jsp>

DIALOG
<http://www.dialog.com/>

Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA)
<http://www.csa.com/>

Here is a message that I received from Chris Terlizzi that explains some
of the issues we discussed perhaps better than I have and it is reproduced
with his permission.

==================================================

Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2006 13:58:17 -0500
From: Christopher Terlizzi <ChristopherTerlizzi@...>
To: "'jwne@...'" <jwne@...>
Subject: ***** Recap of EBSCO advanced searching

Good Afternoon David,

It's been a pleasure speaking with you the past couple of days, and I'm
glad that we had the opportunity to research some of the underlying
problems regarding advanced searching strategy on EBSCOhost.

As I had mentioned, market analysis/customer feedback resulted in
EBSCOhost moving away from the three different search screens that we
offered in years past. The three search screens that we use to offer were
Basic, Guided, and Advanced screens/tabs...here's a quick description of
the three:

* Basic: single search field with minimal limiters/expanders visible, and
no access to 'Search History' screen. Designed for quick/limited searching

* Guided: offered multiple search fields as well as drop-down lists where
you can choose to narrow search to specific fields, as well as drop-down
lists to select/apply AND, OR, NOT operators in between search fields.
Designed to allow more focused searching than the Basic search, and
allowed access to 'Search History' screen

* Advanced: single search field with several limiters/expanders visible,
allowed access to 'Search History' screen. Although you can still use
advanced search parameters in the Basic search, such as field codes,
boolean operators, nesting, truncation and proximity...it's typically in
this Advanced search screen where the power researchers performed that
type of searching strategy.

Over time we also created what we now call 'Single Find with Search
Builder', which is almost like a hybrid of the Advanced and Guided Styles.
In an effort to 'tidy-up' our interface yet still offer all four search
screens, we made the decision--again based on customer feedback--to offer
two types of Search screens on our interface, a Basic and Advanced. The
way that we now offer (I say now, but this is what's been in place for a
few years now) access to Guided Style, Single Find, and Single Find with
Search Builder is by a setting within EBSCO's Administrative Module
(EBSCOadmin) that designates which Advanced Search screen to display.

The majority of our customers utilize the Guided Style, which is what
Temple uses as well, but Guided Style is somewhat limited in that you have
to use the drop-down lists if you want to utilize boolean operators and
field codes, you cannot manually type them in the find fields if you want
accurate results. For the type of power searching that you are accustomed
to conducting, we recommend using the Single Find, and you might also try
out the Search Builder as well. In order to use the additional types of
Advanced Search options I need to create two additional 'profiles' under
your EBSCOadmin account, which Brian has approved of. This suggestion
could be made to other EBSCOhost customers that you know of that may have
felt limited or irritated by the results they got when conducting heavy
research with the Guided Style search screen. These additional profiles
will contain all of your EBSCOhost databases, but the Advanced Search
screen will differ, allowing access to whichever one you like the best.
It's important to consider that EBSCO provides service to many different
customers in several disciplines, and that we offer many different
configurations and options to suit different needs; so if customers feel
frustrated with our service there may just be a few setting changes which
we can easily make, that may fix the 'problem', just contact us to see if
we can help.

I will provide Brian with the necessary URLs/links for the new profiles,
to incorporate into the facility which you use to access EBSCOhost. You
will also be able to find the new profiles by clicking on the EBSCOhost
tab that reads "Select another EBSCO Service".

We also talked about concerns that you had with truncation. Our truncation
options have undergone updates, which has resulted in improved results.
As we saw yesterday, interchanging plurals with an asterisk yielded
expected results.

I am very pleased that we had the opportunity to look at these issues, and
I am looking into another which you had brought up as well, regarding and
error message that you get. It will be helpful if you can try to capture a
print screen the next time that it happens, and give me a call back when
it occurs, there are a few tests we can try.

I also want you to know that we highly regard customer feedback, and based
on your request for a more powerful type of nesting, I am submitting an
enhancement request for our developers to explore. One good example of an
enhancement request that we recently honored is the ability to access the
Search History tab from the Basic Search screen, there is a setting in
Admin which I can change that will allow that now.

In closing, I am providing the following links from our Support Site that
point out some upcoming changes/features with our interface that you might
already be aware of:


Support Site homepage:
http://support.epnet.com/custsupport/Customer/Search.aspx


Upcoming Software Enhancements:
http://support.epnet.com/support_news/detail.php?id=186



Best Regards,
Chris Terlizzi, MCP
EBSCO Publishing
Customer Account Specialist
800.653.2726 x616
cterlizzi@...
http://www.ebscoweb.com


==================================================

I cannot thank Chris Terlizzi enough for getting me to effective ways of
using EBSCO searching services and databases.



Sincerely,
David Dillard
Temple University
(215) 204 - 4584
jwne@...
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