CSA Illustrata, Gale Virtual Reference Library, and Cambridge Journals

摘要

One of my picks is the innovative, cutting-edge CSA Illustrata database, launched at Midwinter ALA, with nearly 1 million illustrations extracted from more than 165,000 scholarly articles. Enhanced by a variety of illustration-specific index terms that describe important attributes of the graphs, charts, photographs, tables, and other figures, it offers unprecedented precision in finding articles that discuss and show, say, the phenomenon and management of beach erosion. CSA Illustrata is not merely an evolutionary step or an experimental system of a grant project, but it is a giant leap in scholarly information retrieval from commercially available systems.