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The Charleston Advisor reviews InteLex Past MastersThe following review was published in The Charleston Advisor, Volume 5, Number 3, November 2003. To read the review at The Charleston Advisor website, please visit http://charlestonco.com/review.cfm?id=176. The review is reproduced here by permission. Product Title: InteLex Past Masters Reviewer
Composite 4.625 Content 4.50 Standard editions of works of philosophy, political science, religion, and English letters are the focus of this 75+ database collection. Original-language editions (German for the most part) and English translations are both available. Searchability 4.00 The InteLex search interface is powerful and fairly intuitive; context-sensitive help is well-written and useful. Boolean, keyword, and proximity searches can be performed within one text or across databases. Price 5.00 Pricing information is easily obtained and straightforward; each database is separately priced, and overlapping content between databases is taken into account in the pricing structure. The annual access fee is determined by number of databases purchased and FTE. Compared to other full-text products, the purchase price is affordable and the access fees are very reasonable. Consortial pricing is available. Contract 5.00 Institutions can customize their purchase by selecting specific databases or categories, which is appealing. Campus-wide access can be provided via either the InteLex web server or by loading the texts onto a campus server. Archival CDs of the texts insure long-term access to the product.
Pricing for InteLex Past Masters units is based on a one-time purchase cost plus an annual fee for Web access. There is a $50 one-time setup fee for the user guide and FolioVIEWS search engine. The annual Web access fee varies with the number of databases and FTE count but is quite reasonable, ranging from $200 to $3,000, with the vast majority in the $750–$1,000 range. For individual databases, the one-time campus-wide access purchase prices range from $250 for the smaller segments, such as the Inquiries and Essays of Donald Davidson, to Schopenhauer’s Hauptwerke at $800, The Works of Darwin for $2,500, and The Collected works of Marx and Engels at $5,000. Several segments in the English Letters titles run higher, as these are larger collections; the Modern Era: 1800–1950 segment, for example, is $7,800. MARC records for all titles are available to download for no additional charge. Overlap in content between the databases is taken into consideration in pricing, so institutions will not pay twice for the same content. Consortial and other discounts are available. Complete pricing details for the individual fulltext databases can be found at http://www.nlx.com/pstm/pstmall.htm
InteLex has been providing fulltext humanities databases since 1989, and now offers 75 (and growing) Web-based collections in the areas of philosophy, German studies, the history of political thought, the history and philosophy of science, religion, and increasingly, English letters. Each collection ranges from works of an individual author to thematically linked works. InteLex provides several other fulltext and indexing products through the same interface, including the Motif-Index of Folk Literature; POIESIS, an index and fulltext database of philosophy journals; and the Oxford Classical Dictionary. The focus of this review will be on the fulltext corpora rather than the index and reference titles. The early Past Masters databases focused on philosophers and theologians, and that influence is still evident when viewing the available titles: starting with Aquinas, Aristotle, and Augustine and progressing through Descartes, Hegel, and Nietszche, the big names are all in attendance. Today, the world of English letters is also represented, with the inclusion of the letters and/or journals of some of the standard names in the canon: Austen, Dickens, Hardy, the Wordsworths, and Yeats, to name a few. Some of these individual-author databases have been packaged together to provide thematic collections; thirteen categories are currently available, including “American Thought,” “Continental Thought,” “Theology,” and “Woman Writers.” Many humanities texts, especially those in philosophy and literature, are available on nonsubscription Web sites, which leads many of us in these times of lean budgets to question the need to pay for what may seem to be available free elsewhere. But, in spite of the strong showing of stable subject Web sites such as Voice of the Shuttle http://vos.ucsb.edu and Philosophy Resources on the Internet http:/www. epistemelinks.com, when standard Internet evaluation criteria are applied the fulltext links from these sites are often no more stable, nor are the texts themselves of more scholarly provenance, than what can be found in an average undergraduate’s Google search. Past Masters databases, on the other hand, include the text of highly respected, complete, scholarly editions and translations, a strong search engine capable of searching across texts, and features such as textual notes and pagination. These factors, along with the reasonable pricing, makes Past Masters titles appealing to a broad user spectrum, from casual readers and undergraduates searching for an online version of a text to scholars performing high-level research. Faculty and graduate students are often the instigators of Past Master purchases; ten years ago, when these products were available in CD-ROM format only, users would flock to reference workstations to sit and read, search, and compile notes. Even then, with the print edition of the works sitting on the shelves not far away, many scholars preferred the electronic version for their research. With Web access to Past Masters titles, users can now perform cross-database searches and comparisons anytime, anywhere, assured that they are using quality editions. In some cases, these online texts have replaced traditional classroom texts and reserve readings for undergraduates. Use is increased further when the MARC records for these titles appear in the library’s OPAC, making for a seamless multiformat research process.
InteLex provides valuable assistance to researchers by providing their full text with the FolioVIEWS search engine. For scholars researching large amounts of material, it provides more options than PDF for searching and manipulating text, and for highlighting text and making notes. The default introductory screen contains drop-down menus listing categories––e.g., Woman Writers, History and Philosophy of Science–– and individual titles within those categories (for example, Dickens: Letters, Gladstone: Diaries) available at that institution. To browse, users select a category, then a title; they also have the option to click on the PowerSearch link. In Browse mode, when a specific title is selected, a split screen then displays. Users can browse the document text, navigate through the table of contents, or perform a basic keyword search from this first results screen. If, for instance, one wanted to track the word “education” in the Collected Works of John Dewey, that can be done here. The left side of the screen serves as a navigation window, with a hyperlinked table of contents, and, if a search has been performed, the occurrences of the word in context. The full document, with the search term highlighted, appears in the right-hand window. Also displayed is the Past Masters preface, which includes edition information and other contents notes, and in some cases, navigational tips. Users can scroll through fifteen paragraphs of text at a time, with arrows providing links to further and previous text. Paragraphs are tagged with useful reference line information should the text need to be located in the print edition. Icons at the top of the results document take users to the main navigation toolbar or shift the view from the default split-screen browse view to a full-screen document view. The PowerSearch tab can be selected from any screen; options include keyword, phrase, and proximity searches from one or more works or categories. Context-sensitive Help is available at all search stages. Keyword options in the PowerSearch include the not-instantly-intuitive options of All, Any, Phrase, and None, which effectively work as Boolean operators in disguise. All and None limit results to those hits which have all or none of the listed terms, while Any acts as a Boolean OR. A Phrase search lists results that contain the entire search phrase. Advanced query syntax is not command-language searching as we librarians know it, but it does allow the user to perform more advanced Boolean searches than can be done at the keyword search level. A summary screen displays search results, listing the number of hits in each database; for example, a keyword search on “Marriage” and “work” (using the All option) in the Woman Writers category (at this time consisting of letters, journals, and notebooks from Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Fanny Burney, George Eliot, and Katherine Mansfield) shows quickly and cleanly 3 results in Austen, 15 results in Bronte, and so on. The “results map” also shows how many hits there were for each term searched, before the terms were combined, which can be very useful to searchers. For example, for this same search there were 23 hits for “marriage” and 329 hits for “work” in the Notebooks and Library of George Eliot, but zero when the terms were combined. Users must then select one of the results sets to view. The results screen is identical to the browse screen except that the user is taken directly to the desired text rather than the frontmatter of the text. The left-hand side Table of Contents shows the key word in the brief context of four words before and after each occurrence. The right side of the screen displays the complete text of the title in question, with the key words highlighted. Navigation can be clunky at times. For example, if the user investigates all the results of this search in the Austen letters, then wants to return to view the results in the Bronte letters, the browser’s Back button seems to be the only way to do so without completely repeating the search. Perhaps this serves as a warning to eager scholars who indiscriminately search across many databases at a time. A Tools link option is available from both Browse and PowerSearch results screens, and lets the user select a dictionary, translation, map, or encyclopedia to obtain further information on a topic. Currently these links go to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, the FreeTranslation site (with links to higher-quality, fee-based translation options), the National Geographic.com map site, and the fifth edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia. Clicking on any of these choices brings up a new browser window that includes a link back to the InteLex site, although this link was not functional at the time of this review. Output Options and PowerSearches: text can be printed from the results screen, or a persistent URL can be e-mailed. However, when a results URL was accessed from e-mail, this user was denied entry to the Past Masters site, even though browser windows were open to the databases at the time. Downloading is restricted to personal use and cannot be reproduced for instructional purposes. InteLex provides quarterly use statistics; these are supplied as Word documents. Titles are listed alphabetically, and for each title there is information on the number of sessions, total time use, average time per session, and number of turnaways.
Institutions have the option of Web or CD access; archival CDs of the databases are provided for a nominal fee.
Authentication is by IP address or via institutional proxy server.
No author references provided.
No additional references provided.
InteLex Corporation
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