| UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA - AFRICAN STUDIES CENTER |
Index to Periodical Literature from Eastern and Southern Africa Electronic Bibliographic Search Service
provided by the Library of Congress Office, Nairobi
in conjunction with UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Integrated Regional Information Network for Central and Eastern Africa
Version 0.6 May 1998
INTRODUCTION
The Nairobi Office of the Library of Congress indexes selected periodicals which are received regularly in its programme to acquire publications from 24 eastern and southern African countries. On the whole, scholarly journals are indexed; however, a number of journals not of a scholarly nature are included but not indexed exhaustively. The full database of over 19,000 article references published between 1991 and 1997 can now be searched via e-mail.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Integrated Regional Information Network (IRIN) has developed an e-mail interface to the database established by the Library of Congress. IRIN is supporting the service as part of its information exchange initiatives in Africa. For further information, write to irin@dha.unon.org.
A query sent by e-mail can contain a number of search terms, and an automatic reply should be returned automatically within a couple of hours. The reply will contain the reference to the article (Author, Title, Volume, etc) but not the text itself. The publications themselves are not available electronically, but can be requested from the publishers. A second database holds the postal addresses for the publishers.
EXAMPLES
Send e-mail to serials@loc.sasa.unon.org with any subject you like, and with a body containing: find word word word (up to nine).
Example: By: you@your.address To: serials@loc.sasa.unon.org Re: anything ----------------------- find uganda ecology
You should get an automatic reply, listing the references to all articles which contain both the words Uganda and ecology. If you put a slash (uganda/ecology), you will get all the articles that *either* have uganda or ecology in them.
If you find an article you are interested in, you can get the address of the journal by sending a mail to address@loc.sasa.unon.org using the same syntax. Example message text: find nairobi law monthly
TIPS AND HINTS
* Your search will fail if you don't put "find" in there somewhere. * You must use at least one search term, up to nine. * If your search generates more than 40 "hits", you will be asked to focus your search a little. If you don't get any hits, you should also be told. * Partial word matches will generate hits.
WARNING
This is now in the "beta" testing phase so be patient. Your assistance in suggesting new features, finding bugs, etc is much appreciated. If the service proves popular, we will invest more time in refining the service and user interface.
PLANNED FEATURES
* To be able to search by field (i.e. author = Bloggs) * To choose your own maximum hits level * Accented characters in MIME format?
The service is presently maintained by: Ben Parker (ben@ocha.unon.org) for IRIN-CEA. The Library of Congress Nairobi Office is contactable on: loc-nbo@thorntree.com
REFERENCE
Reference for the Index: Quarterly Index to Periodical Literature, Eastern and Southern Africa (Volume I, Number 1, 1991), Library of Congress Office, Nairobi.
[ENDS]
[The material contained in this communication comes to you via IRIN, a UN humanitarian information unit, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies. UN IRIN Tel: +254 2 622123 Fax: +254 2 622129 e-mail: irin@dha.unon.org for more information or subscriptions. If you re-print, copy, archive or re-post this item, please retain this credit and disclaimer. Quotations or extracts should include attribution to the original sources. IRIN reports are archived on the WWW at: http://www.reliefweb.int/emergenc or can be retrieved automatically by sending e-mail to archive@dha.unon.org. Mailing list: irin-cea-weekly]
Date: Wed, 20 May 1998 14:54:37 -0300 (GMT+3) From: IRIN - Central and Eastern Africa <irin@ocha.unon.org> Subject: IRIN: New Service: Index to African Periodical Literature 1998.5.20 Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.95.980520145229.25873V-100000@amahoro.dha.unon.org>
Editor: Dr. Ali B. Ali-Dinar, Ph.D
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