Library of Congress Nairobi Office Bibliographic Search Service

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS OFFICE, NAIROBI
BIBLIOGRAPHIC SEARCH SERVICE

Version 0.3 November 22 1995

Now includes Volume 3 (1994) and the first three quarters of 1995. Total records: 5482

<the latest version of this file is always available by sending an e-mail to: info@loc.sasa.unep.no>

BACKGROUND

Quarterly Index to Periodical Literature, Eastern and Southern Africa (Volume I, Number 1, 1991), Library of Congress Office, Nairobi.

The Nairobi Office of the Library of Congress undertakes to index 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.

A pilot system has been set up in Nairobi whereby anyone with an Internet address may search an extract of the periodicals database (Volume 3). Soon, we should be able to offer the full database of about 17,000 records using the same system. A query sent by e-mail can contain a number of search terms, and a reply should be returned automatically within a couple of hours at most. 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.

HOW TO USE IT

Send e-mail to serials@loc.sasa.unep.no 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.unep.no
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.

TIPS AND HINTS

o Your search will fail if you don't put "find" in there somewhere.
o You must use at least one search term, up to nine.
o 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.

CAVEAT EMPTOR

This is very much in the testing phase so be patient. Your assistance in suggesting new features, finding bugs, etc is much appreciated.

WISHLIST

o To be able to search by field (i.e. author = Bloggs)
o To choose your own maximum hits level
o Special characters in MIME format?

We have 5,482 records in the extract available so far.

The service is presently maintained by:

Ben Parker (ben.parker@sasa.unep.no)

The Library of Congress Nairobi Office is contactable on:
loc-nbo@tt.sasa.unep.no
nairobi@mail.loc.gov

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Message-Id: <199601080225.VAA27434@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu> From: Abdul-Rehman Malik as-Shukri <arm@epas.utoronto.ca> Subject: Library of Congress Nairobi Office Bibliographic Search Service