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When Electric Library (elibrary) was first announced, by Infonautics, Inc. we began using their free trail to evaluate it's usefulness for our school library. To give context to my opinion, you my want to know that our library currently provides (or has recently tested) the following CD based info sets to our 7-12 students: SIRS Researcher, Super TOM+, Newsbank, Ebsco Full Text Elite, UMI ProQuest Direct, and Broadcast News. My Bias: A key attribute of a library tool is how much of professional time is required to suppport student success. The ideal tool would allow students to independently look at the screen, enter their topic, receive a set of relevant hits that are highly useful to them, while introducing the least confusion. Quality tools should lessen our burdens, and therefore provide us with more time to educate ourselves and colleagues.) In my opinion, (after 6 months or so of heavy use) elibrary is nearly the most useful, powerful and promising reference tool available to school libraries. Electric Library provides the most student friendly search engine available. Each item returned from a search request is identified by both a relevance score, and a reading level. These two features make elibrary far more usable than other better known, CD based info sets available to our students. (I have heard from the management of elibrary that a future version will allow users to limit their searches to their own reading level, which should also help students succeed.) In key word mode, SIRS Researcher, for example, returns hits without regard to their relevance to the question. If a student enters a request for "ozone depletion", SIRS returns ALL articles which contains those words, whether they occur in the title and opening paragraphs (likely to be highly relevant), or the last two words in a 5000 word article. This shortcoming causes many students to become lost/confused, and therefore ask for my help. Very few times did students ask for my help using elibrary, yet according to their formerly skeptical science teacher, 100% succeeded in the reference tasks. Currently, elibrary is the only info tool available to school libraries which provides both relevancy and reading level info with every hit. These search features of elibrary outweigh the somewhat inferior array of sources elibrary provides, compared to some of the others. I remain a happy customer of both SIRS researcher (whose new online reference service is improving quickly) and Super Tom+. Each has access to very valuable content, and can easily improve their "search and filter" technology to match those of elibrary.(I'm a bit surprized by the slowness of change on SIRS and Tom, considering I suggested the relevancy and reading level feature to both more thsn 2 years ago!) I believe that elibrary, Electric Library, SIRS Researcher and SuperTOM+ are close to comparable in price, but because of the superior technology elibrary provides, I encourage all school libraians with internet access to sign up for the elib free trial. There is a home subscription available to families for approx $10 per month. I've suggested it to some friends , and they've been amazed. See the WebEd K-12 Curriculum address in my sig below. Electric Library is listed first on the page and can be reached by clicking. Eager to hear other opinions from SLM people. ALL the Best, bk Bob Koechley Director: Visual Logic Consulting, Inc. 2521 Chamberlain Ave., Madison, WI 53705 608.238.8345 bobk@koechley.com __________________ Belleville School District Librarian 101 South Grant Street Belleville, WI 53508 koechley@facstaff.wisc.edu WebEd k12 Curriculum Links at: http://badger.state.wi.us/agencies/dpi/www/WebEd.html Editor of "Libraries and the Internet" 1997, Handbook Series, Highsmith Press