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In spite of the obvious subjectivity, this very-well-implemented system with its free and very reasonably priced offerings is clearly a pick.
My first pick requires a disclosure: ITI InfoCentral Digital Archive derives all its content from Information Today, Inc. (ITI), which in turn owns the periodicals that have published most of my columns and feature articles for the past 15 years. In spite of the obvious subjectivity, this very-well-implemented system with its free and very reasonably priced offerings is clearly a pick. The other pick is the new Clusty system from Vivisimo, showcasing its popular clustering and metasearching technology. The pan is Infotrieve's ArticleFinder 2.0 service, which abandoned its free search service. In addition to a monthly subscription fee, it still has unreasonably high document delivery charges and often levies unrealistic royalty fees.
ITI INFOCENTRAL DIGITAL ARCHIVE
I am delighted with the launch of ITI InfoCentral [www.itiinfocentral.com or http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/infotoday/search.html], which I learned about from a ProQuest press release just as this column was due. (It shows that I am really not in the loop when it comes to ITI matters.) I have been bugging ITI for some time to make its large collection of library and information technology articles digitally available for both searching and direct delivery. After all, ITI publishes the leading periodicals for practicing information professionals, such as Information Today, ONLINE (ahem), Searcher, Computers in Libraries, and DATABASE (renamed EContent in 1999 with a re-launch and focus change in 2001). Most of these are already well-covered by a variety of full-text databases produced by Gale Group, ProQuest, and EBSCO, but these are subscription-based services for libraries. These publications are also included in several indexing and abstracting services, but getting the full-text or page-image version of the typically two- to five-page articles are expensive through document delivery services that typically charge about $20 per transaction.
My wish is now fulfilled-with more than a little help from ProQuest, which makes the full documents searchable for free and charges only $2.95 per item for immediate download. This is somewhat below the direct print delivery charges (that ITI has not increased for more than a decade) and is way below what it costs to get articles through Infotrieve. By the time you read this, I will...