New technologies, new medias, old dificulties: improving the user interface to choose a research database or periodical

Abstract

Information and communication technologies had produced deep transformations in the way publications and other kinds of scientific information flow in academic environments. With the development and popularization of these technologies, many documents are now available in both printed and electronic format. As the number of available documents increases, new questions arise: how can one improve the user interface for better choosing a database? Which databases contain the desired periodic? Is a given periodic heading indexed by more than one database? Is the complete periodic available or only its summary? Which database must be queried on a specific subject? Librarians of North American universities had proposed some solutions to these questions by essentially trying to simplify and optimize the search in the library catalogues (Online Public Access Catalogue - OPAC). The present work proposes the application of the North American idea in the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) library system. More specifically, we would like to provide a high-level interface for automatically combining the user’s searches simultaneously to the UFRGS library system, to the entire set of databases available through the Portal.periodicos from CAPES, and to the free databases available on the Internet.