Books@Ovid - Full Integration With Electronic Databases and Electronic Journals

Author: Reiner Klimesch,  Ovid Technologies, Germany

Fulltexts

Abstract

Electronic books have an intrinsic value as knowledge sources for information professionals, particularly in medical and scientific fields, where access to synoptic and summary information is crucial to people’s workflows. Using an e-book platform, can extend the value of the resource well beyond the intrinsic value of the content.

Innovations in retrieval and output options offered by the underlying search software are as important as the content itself in offering just in time information.

Electronic vendors vary widely in both the software and content features that they offer. Some e-book platforms are limited to table of contents browse, text and image access.

With Ovid’s Books@Ovid, clinicians, researchers and students gain access to additional retrieval tools to access this information quickly and efficiently.

Examples of some of these powerful book discovery and access tools include:

• Dynamic tables of contents
• Back of the book index browsing
• Reference linking
• Live links to external URLs
• Embedded multimedia files
• Updating of content with clearly defined flags and electronic alerts

During this Ovid presentation, we will explore the tools that are currently available and the how they are being implemented by electronic book providers. We will also review additional features that users may need to enhance search and retrieval functionality, and how the next generation of electronic books may satisfy these requirements.

These features are:

• Flexible searching capabilities: Natural language searching and fielded searching with relevance ranking
• Searchable tables
• Structured searching of book content with other electronic resources
• Passage-based results
• Indexing of book content
• Integrated dictionaries
• Interactive data tables that may be used for example, to develop on the fly graphs
• Downloading chapters and sections to portable devices
• URL ‘deep links’ to specific chapters or even headings
• Print formatting of text integrated with images