SOUTHEAST'S KENT LIBRARY ADDS NEW ONLINE RESEARCH SERVICE

Kent Library at Southeast Missouri State University has made a new online service available to Southeast's students, faculty and staff.

Southeast now has a campus wide license to the University Microfilm Inc. (UMI) ProQuest Direct online service.

"This product really helps to provide and supplement the informational resources that students will need in their courses," said Roy Ziegler, periodicals librarian.

ProQuest Direct is an online service which provides access to full, online texts and images to 1,200 journals and indexing/abstracts for 3,300 journals.

ProQuest Direct may be accessed from any on-campus workstation or any off-campus computer connected to the Internet using Southeast's SLIP connection via the Internet at http://www.umi.com/pqdauto

In addition, Kent Library can create individual accounts for classes or students who use a separate Internet provider.

One of the benefits of this system is its convenience in supplementing scholarly and professional research.

With the new service you don't even have to come into the library, Ziegler said. "Fast, convenient access to scholarly information has been the promise of technology, and that promise is now being made good on."

Unlike other online periodical databases, which provide full text articles in ASCII format, ProQuest Direct also provides a digitized image of the actual paper product. This way, not only the words, but also pictures, graphs and charts are all made accessible online.