Dialog Choice: DataStar Data at a Set Price

Dialog Choice provides a simple, easy-to-manage way for you to offer unlimited access to essential content from Dialog throughout your organization—at a single, annual subscription price. Available to corporations, government agencies, law firms and other organizations, Dialog Choice is the sensible option for enterprise-wide deployment of critical, in-depth information resources directly to the desktops of researchers and other knowledge workers.

Dialog Choice is flexible and enables you to target unlimited access to specific departments or work groups, as well as to the entire enterprise. Dialog Choice pricing is based on the databases selected and the number of individuals to be granted unlimited access to those resources. Enterprises can distribute their Dialog Choice content through their portals, intranets and other in-house information-sharing systems.

Customized Content

Content available through the Dialog Choice plan includes high-quality intellectual property data, scientific research and business information and news that are often unavailable on the open Web. More than 120 databases, provided by 62 information providers, are now available through the Dialog Choice plan. For example, a pharmaceutical company might make databases of clinical and toxicological data available to its research and compliance departments worldwide, while a law firm might select a global collection of databases containing fulltext patents for its intellectual property department.

Dialog Choice is a viable option for virtually any organization that recognizes the importance of giving their people immediate access to the best information resources available. Sharing targeted, relevant research and news through the Dialog Choice plan can help organizations make their executives, managers, researchers and others more competitively astute, sensitive to markets and successful in any number of business pursuits. For more information about Dialog Choice, contact your account representative or request a quote.

Call for Applicants: Roger K. Summit Scholarship

Note to aspiring information professionals: Dialog is now seeking applicants from North America for its 2006 Roger K. Summit Scholarship. The award was established to honor Dr. Roger K. Summit, the founder of Dialog, for his outstanding contributions to the field of information science.

Dialog, a Thomson business, annually awards scholarships in different regions of the world to graduate students in library and information sciences, who demonstrate outstanding interest or performance in electronic information services.

The deadline for the 2006 North American scholarship award of US$5,000 is April 30, 2006. The winner will be announced at the Special Libraries Association annual conference, to be held June 11-14, 2006, in Baltimore, MD.

Get your application now.

American Chemical Association (ACS) Conference

If you are attending the ACS conference in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 26-30, stop by the Thomson booths (402 and 404) to learn about the latest products and content at Dialog and DataStar and don't miss the presentation by Bob Stewart on Chemical Structure Searching.

More Flexibility with the REPEAT Command

The REPEAT command in DataStarWeb for searching multiple databases now offers more flexibility. Previously, when repeating multiple steps of a search strategy, DataStarWeb took all steps, put them into one single step and then repeated it in the chosen databases.

With the new REPEAT command, searchers can repeat individual steps of a search strategy. You can choose a start and/or end step, and the system will check and highlight in color the steps that need to be repeated. This new feature enables you to conduct a long, complicated search and then decide on only those steps you want to repeat in other databases. See the related Search Techniques sidebar for more details.

Dialog eLinks: New Interlibrary Loan Feature

If you have defined more than one library with different holdings and established a loan system between those libraries, you will appreciate the new Interlibrary Loan feature through the Dialog eLinks Manager to make your document delivery among these libraries easier.

A new Interlibrary Loan (ILL) feature on the Dialog eLinks Manager will simplify the end user’s ability to obtain original fulltext articles. For each library, customers can define whether the library offers loan to others, as well as identifying the libraries to which and from which the library accepts loans.

In addition to the new Interlibrary Loan feature, a new option on the eLinks filter tab within Dialog eLinks Manager now allows you to choose to have the eLinks display as an image or as text.

Searching Priority Journals In MEDLINE on DataStar Made Easier

If you search MEDLINE® (MEDL,MEZZ), you can now choose one or more of the 120 National Library of Medicine's priority journals using the new Priority Journals drop-down list on the DataStarWeb search page. With this new drop-down list, you no longer have to remember or look up the spelling, ISSN or journal code of a particular priority journal.

The list is particularly useful for searching single-word journal names, such as Lancet or Circulation, as it is otherwise inconvenient to remove unwanted multi-word journal names like Lancet Oncology or Japanese Circulation Journal from a search.

CA SEARCH®: Chemical Abstracts® Updated With IPCR/8 Codes

Chemistry users should note that CA SEARCH®: Chemical Abstracts® (CHZZ, CHEM) now contain the new iternational Patent Classification Reform – Version 8 (IPCR/8) codes, which took effect January 1, 2006.

In an effort to keep you up-to-date on the IPCR/8 classifications and how Dialog is implementing the changes on DataStar, a dedicated Web page has been created. This page is updated regularly to provide relevant information regarding the current status of any changes.

ToxFile® Reloaded

ToxFile (TOXL) has been reloaded and MEDLINE records within ToxFile, which comprise about 80 percent of the file, now use the 2006 MeSH from 1950 to date.

Refer to NLM's Web site for details of the changes.