SEC: GEN: Full text magazine CD-Roms

[Gayle Collins <0659gac@INFORMNS.K12.MN.US>]

I'm sorry about the heading, but I don't know which one to use.  I hope
your're like me and you like to browse through all of the messages anyway!

I need some information from those of you who have previewed or use
full-text magazine CD-Roms.  I have previewed three of them.  It is no
small task to put these items on a network just to preview them!  I looked
at EBSCO, UMI Resource One, and TOM.  There is only a couple hundred
dollars separating each of them by cost, so I had to look further to find
some differences.  The magazine lists for UMI and TOM are similar, EBSCOs
is far different and not geared for high schools.  Between UMI and TOM, I
thought UMI had a better selection of high school magazines.  UMI has gone
to indexing The New York Times, just like the Readers' Guide does, and
since there are lots and lots of entries for the New York Times, and we
have no access to it, it is frustrating for the students and for me to
continually turn them down.  It also indexes the USA Today newspaper but I
can keep copies of that one around.  What kinds of selection criteria do
the rest of you use?  EBSCO indexes 499 magazines but only full-text for
125.  Of the other 374 magazines, I have only subscribed to about 20 of
them.  The rest would be useless for my high school - and, again,
frustrating for students.  I suppose I could generate thousands of
inter-library loan requests, but that would sort of be defeating the
purpose of an full-text service.  For those of you who have already made
the decision, which one did you go with and why.  For those of you who use
UMIs Resource One (which is the way I'm leaning), how do you like it?
Would you choose it again?  What do you students and staff say about it?

Do any of you remember a gentleman who used to work for Newsbank by the
name of Ben Mondloch?  He is now with UMI and he is good! He is trying to
get more high schools involved in UMI and is the K-12 education manager.

I'm sorry this message got so long, but I need to talk to someone else when
I make these kinds of decisions, just to justify my own thinking.  That is
what is so great about the LM_NET.  Thanks to each of you who reply.

Gayle Collins
Northfield High School
Northfield, Minnesota
0659gac@informns.k12.mn.us