Index to Periodical Literature from Eastern and Southern Africa
---------------------------------------------------------------
Source: AFRIK-IT@LISTSERV.HEA.IE
Electronic Bibliographic Search Service
provided by the Library of Congress Office, Nairobi
in conjunction with UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Af-
fairs Integrated Regional Information Network for Central and Eastern
Africa
INTRODUCTION
The Nairobi Office of the Library of Congress indexes selected periodi-
cals which are received regularly in its programme to acquire publica-
tions from 24 Eastern and Southern African countries. On the whole,
scholarly journals are indexed; however, a number of journals not of a
scholarly nature are included but not indexed exhaustively. The full
database of over 19,000 article references published between 1991 and
1997 can now be searched via e-mail.
The UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs Integrated
Regional Information Network (IRIN) has developed an e-mail interface
to the database established by the Library of Congress. IRIN is sup-
porting the service as part of its information exchange initiatives in
Africa. For further information:
A query sent by e-mail can contain a number of search terms, and an
automatic reply should be returned automatically within a couple of
hours. The reply will contain the reference to the article (Author,
Title, Volume, etc.) but not the text itself. The publications them-
selves are not available electronically, but can be requested from
the publishers. A second database holds the postal addresses for the
publishers.
EXAMPLES
Send e-mail to: <serials@loc.sasa.unon.org> with any subject you like,
and with a body containing: find word word word (up to nine).
Example:
By: you@your.address
Re: anything
-----------------------
find Uganda Ecology
You should get an automatic reply, listing the references to all arti-
cles which contain both the words Uganda and ecology. If you put a
slash (Uganda/Ecology), you will get all the articles that *either*
have Uganda or ecology in them.
If you find an article you are interested in, you can get the address
of the journal by sending a mail to <address@loc.sasa.unon.org> using
the same syntax. Example message text: find Nairobi Law Monthly
TIPS AND HINTS
* Your search will fail if you don't put "find" in there somewhere.
* You must use at least one search term, up to nine.
* If your search generates more than 40 "hits", you will be asked to
focus your search a little. If you don't get any hits, you should
also be told.
* Partial word matches will generate hits.
WARNING
This is now in the "beta" testing phase so be patient. Your assistance
in suggesting new features, finding bugs, etc. is much appreciated. If
the service proves popular, we will invest more time in refining the
service and user interface.
PLANNED FEATURES
* To be able to search by field (i.e. author = Bloggs)
* To choose your own maximum hits level
* Accented characters in MIME format?
The service is presently maintained by: Ben Parker <ben@dha.unon.org>
for IRIN-CEA. The Library of Congress Nairobi Office can be contacted:
Jeff Cochrane
1111 North 19th Street Suite 210
Arlington, VA 22209 USA
Tel: +1-703-235-5415
Fax: +1-703-235-3805
mailto:jeffc@info.usaid.gov
http://www.info.usaid.gov/alnk
--
Send mail for the `AFRO-NETS' conference to `afro-nets@usa.healthnet.org'.
Mail administrative requests to `majordomo@usa.healthnet.org'.
For additional assistance, send mail to: `owner-afro-nets@usa.healthnet.org'.