The MIT Libraries announce that the MIT community will have unlimited free access to 20 large information databases in the OCLC FirstSearch online reference service from now through December.
The databases include WorldCat, with 24 million records of material owned by libraries around the world and a table-of-contents service and an affiliated article index allow you to scan the contents of more than 11,000 current periodicals in science, technology, medicine, the social sciences, business, humanities and popular culture. In addition, specific databases provide citation information to material in education, geological sciences, biological and biomedical sciences, business, the social sciences, consumer materials, and US government documents. Finally, EventLine contains information about upcoming conferences and workshops. A significant portion of the sources cited in these databases is available in the MIT Libraries and Libraries' staff can obtain copies of materials not at MIT.
The FirstSearch databases may be accessed over the Internet by using the following telnet command:
FirstSearch will be available weekdays, 6am-11pm, Saturdays, 8am-8pm and Sundays, noon-8pm.
The Libraries are very interested in user reactions to this online reference service in order to evaluate its long-term value. Users are encouraged to send comments to:
A version of this article appeared in the November 12, 1992 issue of MIT Tech Talk (Volume 37, Number 13).
