By CARMEN DURLAN
With Winter Semester finals behind them, some students breathe a sigh of relief and resolve to do better on upcoming papers and tests.
Knowledge of the Harold B. Lee Library’s computer resources can increase students’ abilities to access information for such upcoming assignments.
Some of the library’s resources are BYLINE (Brigham Young Libraries Information Network), Full Text, the World Wide Web, LAN (Local Area Network) and on-line catalogs of other libraries. All of these resources are available through Gateway except LAN, which is accessed from separate computers.
The BYLINE system is the same on-line catalog as the NOTIS computer system. NOTIS was renamed BYLINE for BYU in 1984 by a public contest for a title, said Paul Jordan, university librarian for technical services.
NOTIS stands for Northwestern On-line Technical Information System and was first developed and used at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., he said.
Northwestern marketed NOTIS and sold it to Ameritech Library Services, said Bill Lund, department chair of library information systems.
BYLINE, or NOTIS, runs on a mainframe computer in the James E. Talmage Building. The mainframe stores the data that you are searching for and is called up onto the library’s computer screen in the format in which you see it, Jordan said.
The computer workstations in the HBLL are acting as “dumb terminals.” This means the information you search for is not on the hard drive on each computer in the library, he said.
By connecting to Gateway, one accesses information stored on the mainframe in the TMCB and around the world. On a majority of the workstations, the information cannot be downloaded because it is only an image on the computer screen, he said.
However, another option in Gateway is Full Text. Though presently limited in its capabilities, students can call up the full text of documents onto their terminal’s screen and print it in the HBLL Copy Center for 15 cents per page. Any document abstract with “REQ DOC” at the bottom of the computer screen is available in full text.
The full text of 900 journals in the ABI Inform Business Index and UMI General Periodicals Index dating from the mid-1980s is available, Jordan said.
Students can also obtain the full text of publications by searching the World Wide Web on one of four computers by several reference desks in the HBLL. One computer is on the third floor, two are on the second floor and one is on the first floor, said Haybron Adams, reference librarian.
Gateway and BYLINE Next Generation, for people accessing BYLINE off-campus on the World Wide Web through file transfer protocol, are on these computers.
BYLINE Next Generation is a World Wide Web interface to bibliographic databases, such as BYLINE, that uses Netscape to search, Lund said.
Information from the Web can be printed without charge on the printers next to the computers, Adams said.
Gateway provides students access to other databases such as LAN.
LAN “gives access to additional computerized periodical indexes and databases, including science, psychology, religion, history, sociology, education, social sciences, humanities, statistics, Utah library’s holding, a national telephone directory and others,” according to the “Welcome to the Harold B. Lee Library” booklet, available in the library.
“It is set up so that most of the material on there is full text and can only be downloaded (onto a disk, although) it depends on which database you are searching,” Adams said.
LAN’s telephone directory contains all listed phone numbers and addresses in the United States and Canada. There is another directory for toll-free numbers, he said.
Students can also access the catalogs of libraries in other states and countries, such as the Library of Congress, Utah State University, University of Utah, Arizona State University, Yale, Harvard, Michigan University and several colleges in California, by choosing the option under the Gateway menu
