Judaic Scholar Digital Reference Library

摘要

In just over ten years, Judaic Scholar Digital Reference Library (JS-DRL) has grown from a 100-title CD-ROM product to an online resource featuring nearly 1,000 titles. All of the resources are available for immediate reading as ebooks, which is great; unfortunately, the database's organization is haphazard and searches are hit and miss. On the main page, the appearance of a dozen category subheadings such as Jewish Education and Modern Political Thought suggest that once a user clicks on one of those categories, every relatable title in the database will be listed. However, this is not the case. For instance, selecting Biography/Memoirs yields only 12 titles, when actually there are many more. Keyword searches are also problematic. The term Masorti, the name given to the Conservative Judaism movement, yields no hits with a keyword search. Assuming users don't give up at this point, they can try a "full text" keyword search which mines the content of every book and lists and highlights hits. Such a search for Masorti produces 12 hits. Some of the titles in the database are written in Hebrew, and users need a way to access those. Accordingly, an icon that resembles a keyboard appears by the search box. Once a user clicks on it, a small keyboard with language options pops up on the screen. Users can select Hebrew and go from there.