A Revamped HOLLIS

Every so often in this space we will highlight technological, advances that have a direct benefit to the Harvard community. Sometimes these advances will be sweeping, other times incremental.

HOLLIS Plus is of the latter variety. Our old reliable electronic card catalog has been beefed up over the past few months. Notably, the improvements have occurred not by adding more local functionality but rather by addition of gateways to outside databases. In short, HOLLIS is metamorphosing from a card catalog to a comprehensive electronic research tool.

Outside of libraries, HOLLIS Plus is most easily accessed from UNIX accounts at the far% prompt. Type "gopher hplus" to enter the system.

The new gopher front-end is perhaps the most useful improvement to HOLLIS. The need for many arcane texts, commands, like "choose hu," has been eliminated.

Moreover, gateways to the databases themselves are organized in a wonderfully logical fashion. One trek into the "HOLLIS Plus resources by subject" area makes this clear. Databases are no longer presented as "ERIC," "PAIS," and "RISM," but as "education," "law," and "music".

Perhaps the most useful feature of HOLLIS Plus is the inclusion of more research databases into the menu system. Taking advantage of gopher technology to its fullest, Harvard's card catalog now includes most of the obscure databases that were previously unavailable from standard HOLLIS terminals.

In practice, this means that databases from graduate schools throughout the University are now included among the standard menu items, allowing easy access to such tools as the World Law Index and the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals.

HOLLIS Plus also includes gateways to other institutional systems such as the Library of Congress gopher and ORBIS, the library tool used by students at a curtain college where football team we will destroy this coming weekend. (What kind of name is ORBIS, anyway!).

But card catalogs to faraway places are only useful to the extent that they can satisfy personal needs. If you have a paper due tomorrow, having HOLLIS Plus tell you that the one odd book you need is sitting on a shelf at UC Berkeley doesn't help much.

HOLLIS Plus acknowledges this fact by offering several services to "bring some of the library home" on a test basis.

One such service is "Inspec," an index of "over 4,000 scientific and technical journals, dissertations, reports, and conference proceedings". Each entry contains a complete abstract, which is meant to save the research time (just how much time is another question). Whether Harvard will subscribe to the service in the future depends on our response to it during the test trial; an opinion box is provided online.

Other "enhanced" database services include "CARL Uncover," a system that will supposedly fax copies of papers listed in its archives upon request. We'll see about that. When I tried to use the service, my display barfed and began spewing unintelligible control characters.

Speaking of unintelligibility, the HOLLIS Plus databases do not share a common exit procedure, leaving you to try out different commands until you find the right one. If you find yourself lost in the system, try the commands "quit," "exit," "ex," "q" and "bye". Or try pressing the Escape key on your keyboard, then hitting the "x" key twice.

The University Library has sure done a great job getting us into all of these powerful research tools--now if they could just develop a simple method for us to get out...

Eugene Koh '96-'97 writes about technology issues for the Harvard Crimson. He is Remote Staff Manager, Media Services, at America Online, Inc. He also composes soundtracks for CD-ROMs and may be reached online as "ekoh@fas.harvard.edu."