Library InfoGate

Gan Kim Hong, EDMRS Project Team Member

The NUS Library, in conjunction with Wang Computers, has developed an electronic document management and retrieval system which offers staff and students desktop access to selected collections of the Library. Known as Library InfoGate, the system was officially launched in April 1995 and is available now on NUSNET-II, the campus network.

For a start, three databases are available to users: Examination Papers (EXAM), Current Contents (CURR) and PERIND (PERI).

Examination Papers (EXAM)

Students can now obtain copies of their examination papers from the Examination Papers (EXAM) database. It stores the fulltext of the University's past examination papers. You would first need to do a search in one or more of the following fields: faculty, course number, year of examination, academic level, and subject. The image of the examination paper can be viewed on the screen, printed or downloaded onto a diskette.

As the database is now available on the network, you can access the examination papers even if you are not in the library and even after the library's loan hours.

Currently, papers of the last five years of the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences and the Faculty of Science examinations are available. Examination papers of the other faculties will be added soon.

Current Contents (CURR)

Teaching staff who used to have their journal current contents pages manually circulated to them may now view them at leisure in the Current Contents (CURR) database. Up to the last three months' current contents are accessible on the system.

You may look for journal titles relating to your area of interest by searching in one or more of the following fields: journal title, volume number, issue number, publication year, subject, and call number.

Currently, selected journals subscribed by the Hon Sui Sen Memorial Library and the Science Library are available. Titles subscribed by the other libraries will be added soon.

Current Contents is not longer maintained, however the library subscribes to Current Contents Connect from ISI which replaces the database. Updated 6 June 2002.

PERIND (PERI)

If you are looking for articles on Singapore or the ASEAN region, a useful database to search is the Perind database. Perind is our in-house database in which journal articles relating to Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei and ASEAN (as an entity) are indexed. Subject coverage of these articles spans the humanities and social sciences, architecture and building, business and management, banking and finance, law and medicine. Most of the citations are from 1980 onwards except for those contributed by the Medical Library (from 1975 onwards) and the Law Library (from 1932 onwards).

Currently, there are over 50,000 bibliographic citations in PERIND. Due to copyright restrictions, we are unable to put the fulltext of the articles in, only the bibliographic citations are available.

You may look for citations by searching in one or more of the following fields: author of article, title of article, source title, subject headings, etc.

Future databases

Two new databases to be added are :

• Academic Exercises and Theses
  Contains the fulltext of academic exercises and theses submitted to NUS.
• Archival Photograph Collection on NUS
  For the photograph collection which documents the UniversityÕs history and development.

Using Library Infogate

You may do fairly sophisticated searches such as:

• cross-field searching (e.g. combine author and title)
• combine two or more search statements
• use a wide range of Boolean, adjacency and other search operators
• use limit options (e.g. limit your search to the latest additions to the database)
• browse the index to look for appropriate search terms to use
• select and search a term from a retrieved text
• use the FIND button to locate a word in the Abstracts and Full Text window
• save your search statements onto a floppy diskette and run the search strategy at a later time or in another database

The system provides two menu-driven search levels: Brief Search and Form Search. Use Brief Search if you are unfamiliar with the system. To conduct more elaborate searches, use Form Search which is basically similar to Brief Search but allows a greater range of search operators such as AND, OR, XOR to be used.

You may choose to display your records in three formats:

To view the text image of a record (if any), simply click on the image icon at either the Abstracts or the Full Text window. Navigation buttons and icons such as TOP, PREVIOUS, NEXT, LAST, GOTO, ZOOM IN, ZOOM OUT and MAGNIFY are provided for you to move from one image to the next and within the image itself.

You may print or download the records and images retrieved, within set limits. Printing facilities are provided, at a charge, for users in all the NUS libraries.

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LINUS July 1995, NUS Libraries