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The picks include two databases that are equally good or better substitutes for two services that were, or are likely to be, discontinued. One is (in spite of its deficiencies) the BizTech Library, because it provides a lot of bang (50 articles) for the buck (the $7.95 monthly subscription fee), with the full text of articles from nearly 5,000 professional and scholarly journals. The other pick is the Energy Citations Database from the U.S. Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) that, except for one feature, is far superior to the Pub SCIENCE database. The pan is Yahoo! for abandoning subscribers of its Research Document Collection.
BIZTECH LIBRARY
the picks
Ziff Davis Media Inc., the largest publisher of information technology and specifically personal computer journals, has been struggling for years with how to have paying customers for the online versions of its own journals and ones licensed from online aggregators. I have been using ZDNet's BizTech Library [http://cma.zdnet.com] since Ziff-Davis created CMA. (Computer Magazine Archives-the name still appears in its URL, though it's also known as ZDNet TechInfoBase. ZDNet is now owned by CINET.) I will use it even more, now that it offers a far larger collection of many library and information technology journals, something not apparent from its name.
Its history is too convoluted to recount here. Suffice it to say that in its latest incarnation, there's an archive of about 370 information technology journals (drawn from Gale's Computer Database Plus), and more than 4,000 other journals of general and specialist interest (contributed by divine's Northern Light Special Collections, which in turns pulls articles from Gale Group, ProQuest, and Janet Matthews databases, as well as various newswires). It also tells you a lot about how little ZDNet knows about 'what it offers in this collection,...
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