[OPLINLIST] BIG database news (pass it on)

[Stephen Hedges]

At this morning's meeting of the State Library of Ohio Board, a grant 
extending LSTA support for the Ohio Web Library databases was approved 
for another year. The State Library will be sending our more details 
shortly, but I wanted to let you know ASAP that this year, in addition 
to support for Biography Reference Bank, EBSCOhost, Learning Express, 
Job & Career Accelerator, Oxford Reference, Science Online, and World 
Book, the Board also added support for two ADDITIONAL databases as 
one-year pilot projects: Mango Languages, and Ancestry Library Edition.

Mango Languages is an online foreign language learning system. The 
languages covered by the package are: Arabic (Levantine), Chinese 
(Cantonese), Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dari, Dutch, 
Farsi, Finish, French, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, 
Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Pashto, 
Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Slovak, Spanish (Latin American), Tagalog, 
Tami, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, and Vietnamese. In addition, there 
are 15 English-as-a-Second Language (ESL) packages to help various 
foreign language speakers learn English.

ProQuest Ancestry Library Edition delivers billions of records in census 
data, vital records, directories, photos, and more, contained in over 
7,000 databases. Unlike the other Ohio Web Library databases, Ancestry 
Library Edition will be restricted to on-site library access (no remote 
access).

We will be working with these vendors over the next few weeks to insure 
that all libraries that currently subscribe to these databases will 
receive credit for their purchases. The State Library will also be 
providing a template for libraries that want to release this news to 
their local press. Throughout these one-year pilot projects we will, of 
course, be closely monitoring public library usage of these databases.

One other piece of database news:

Some vendors provide detailed reports of library usage that include data 
which does not fit easily into the OPLIN Database Usage Reporting Tool 
(ODURT) format of "searches" and "articles"--Learning Express being one 
example. If you go to http://oplin.org/odurt or http://oplin.org/stats 
and click on "More DETAILED Stats," you can now downloaded these 
detailed reports and extract your library's data.

Questions? We'll try to answer them at http://support.oplin.org.

-- 
Stephen Hedges, Director
Ohio Public Library Information Network (OPLIN)
2323 W. Fifth Ave., Suite 130
Columbus, OH 43204
614-728-5250  ::  AIM: hedgesst