Title: ITI InfoCentral
Publisher: Information Today, Inc. & ProQuest
URL: http://www.iti-infocentral.com/
Tested: Feb. 23-25, 2005
Cost: $1.00 - $2.95 per article

Disclosure: Information Today, Inc. has published and sponsored more than 400 of my articles and columns in several of its publications.

The Context

I received news about this database at the end of last November, just when the manuscript for the March/April issue of Péter's Picks and Pans column in Online was due. I could rush it in as a pick, knowing its content very well, doggedly advocating and waiting for such an archive for a long time. I promised an in-depth review to come in this column and here it is.

There is no denying that, while I tried to be objective as possible in judging the content of this database, which includes almost 70% of the papers I have written in English, I may appear biased. Still, I give it a chance, as most of the journals covered by ITI InfoCentral are important sources for many practitioners in the information field.

Most of the periodicals have been available — for different time periods — in full text through various databases of the largest professional online services, such as Thomson Gale, EBSCO, ProQuest, H. W. Wilson, Dialog, WestLaw and Lexis. That is fine for those who have access to one of these services.

For a short time (when both its content and software were good), FindArticles provided free access to many full-text articles from Online, Database, Searcher and Information Today (but not Computers in Libraries). As of now, you may find very few free articles from the stable of Information Today Inc. (ITI) in FindArticles, (with the exception of Emedia and its variant titles). The fee for the limited number of other ITI articles is $9.95 each, or $49.95 for a month of unlimited articles. The problem is that the software of the FindArticles service has relapsed to the sorry state of its debut when it made its parent company LookSmart LookDumb.

Users are better off with the rich content and very good software of HighBeam Research, priced at $19.95 per month or $99.95 per year for unlimited articles. It has substantial coverage of eight of the ITI journals and, for some of them, HighBeam's coverage is more comprehensive as it goes further back, apparently relying on records licensed from the InfoTrac OneFile database. For example, it offers 1,300 full-text articles from Searcher from January 1993, whereas ITI InfoCentral has 999 articles from this magazine only going back to January 1998. HighBeam, however, does not offer a pay-as-you go service.

Northern Light used to be the best source for pay-as-you-go document delivery of articles from ITI and thousands of other journals (although in only plain text format), but after its acquisition by Divine, Inc. the infernal management ruined it and quickly drove the entire company into bankruptcy. The founder of Northern Light bought back the assets at well-below bake sale price at the bankruptcy auction and just launched a $50.00 per month subscription service targeted for non-corporate users. I have not yet been able to review it.

Magportal deserves mention for its laudable free service that finds articles from many open-access journals (such as D-Lib) related to information technology, as well as open-access articles from some subscription-based journals including Information Today, Online and Searcher. Its coverage in the latter category is hit-and-miss as it is not predictable which articles are posted for free by ITI; the number of such articles is very limited anyhow. For the good cluster of information technology journals for practitioners, ITI InfoCentral stands out from the crowd for pay-as-you-go users with its predictable coverage, simple software and excellent fees for ad-hoc article purchasing.

The Content

After acquiring several titles from its archrivals — such as Searcher and Computers in Libraries from the Meckler Corporation; Database/EContent, Online, Multimedia Schools and EMedia from Online, Inc.; and KMWorld, Cyberskeptic's Guide to Internet Research and Consumer Relationship Management — ITI has become the largest publisher of serial publications for information professionals. Beyond the above journals, it also publishes, or published until recently, Information Today, IntraNets, Marketing Library Services, Link-Up, the proceedings of the National Online Meeting, proceedings of the ASIS&T Conference and the crown jewel: the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology.

Journal Base

Ten of the journals mentioned above are part of the ITI InfoCentral Archive. Actually, there are more than 10, depending on how you count them, as Multimedia & Internet @Schools is the successor title of Multimedia Schools and Econtent is the successor of Database. EMedia, had so many preceding title variants (even if we exclude its progenitors Laserdisk Professional in 1988 followed by CD-ROM Professional) that it would be a perennial perfect candidate for the Worst Serial Title Change Award. By now, mere mortals and even serials librarians have given up on tracing its genealogy. They could count on a title change almost as much as on death and taxes and the most recent title change in January 2005 to EventDV has validated them.

The title change of Multimedia Schools to the current title kept the old title part alive, as did many of the variants of EMedia. However, the much respected title Database, which less than a decade ago was ranked among the top journals in the information and library science category by the Institute for Scientific Information, does not appear on the journal menu in the advanced search template. Neither is it mentioned in the press release, or on ITI homepage, as if it were the black sheep of the family. It is not but should be given credit. There is plenty of space on the advanced screen to accommodate the title next to EContent.

For a reality check, out of the 4,687 hits for the mandated search term EContent, 3,128 are actually from Database and only 1,559 from EContent. That's a 67% to 23% ratio. It is not merely a question of principle to give credit where credit is due, but also a practical issue that would serve the interest of both ITI and the customers who may believe that Database is not covered by the archive. Now you know that it is and that it is only missing from the search template and the press releases of ITI and ProQuest.

The same is true for Laserdisk Professional and CD-ROM Professional, the earliest titles of what is now known as EventDV. They are covered by the archive in their entirety and should be listed. CD-ROM Professional alone makes up more than half of the items (3,872 out of 7,156) hidden under Emedia/EventDV.

Luckily, these unacknowledged journals show up, even when you limit your subject search to their current title. You may wonder how this happens. ProQuest has a time-honored and smart tradition of assigning an in-house code (PMID - probably standing for permanent id) for each journal, which doesn't change even if the title and ISSN do. This is used behind the scenes when you limit your search to EContent or Emedia and that's why all the articles in their preceding titles are also retrieved.

The retrospective coverage of journals vary. Information Today is covered for the longest period, from October 1987, followed by Online (January 1988) and Database (April 1988). KM World, on the other hand, is covered only from February 2002, its 13th volume. There are technical and legal reasons for the different retrospective coverage. It would orient users if all the journals would be listed on the advanced menu, listing their start and end-year of coverage.

Database Size & Record Content

The press releases and the blurb on ITI's homepage claim that there are "over 25,000" articles in the archive. In reality, there are much more than that. There are 38,422 items in the archive — a rare occasion when the scope and coverage of a database is not inflated by the PR material, but deflated. True, not all of them are articles because even the inside back and front cover pages are available for most issues (and counted in my total hits above), but editorials, letters to the editor and responses to such letters can be relevant to complement feature articles.

The 25,000 figure probably refers to the number of all of the documents in the archive, excluding table of contents, credit and news items. Of course, there are online services that have been charging fees for table of contents services, so their importance should not be belittled.

Beyond the traditional bibliographic citation elements, the records include other metadata, such as ProQuest's subject and geographic descriptors, classification codes, document type, ISSN, the length of the document in words, and the abstracts (or document summaries) — all provided at no cost. You don't even need to be a registered member.

According to my samples, about 70% of the records have summaries. It is not necessarily the full summary you would have as a ProQuest database user, but is often good enough to serve the purpose of previewing the record in order to decide whether or not to purchase the article. Often the summary is the lead paragraph or a truncated version of the lead paragraph from the article. It would be decent to show the complete summary. True, it would compete a little with the subscription-based Information Science Abstracts that ITI acquired a few years ago, in a move that I thought to be a bad one. Recently, ITI sold it to EBSCO and disassociated its name and business from the database. It may be appropriate for rounding out the coverage of the excellent free abstracting and indexing database from EBSCO — the Library Reference Center, which has free abstracts for about 10,000 articles of ITI journals.

The document type, along with the number of words, is also a useful indicator for getting a feel for the genre and length of the document and to avoid buying a news item that may have only a short-lived value, such as a PR snippet.

My test searches have shown that all of the items are available in one or more full-text format(s): text only, text+graphics and page image. Many of them are available in all the three formats. The text+graphics format is particularly useful for articles that have tables and charts that are not easy to read in page-image format, even when you enlarge them to 125% or 150%. In the text+graphic format, these images have a 200% and 400% enlarged versions, which are displayed fairly quickly.

Pay-per-view options

Pay-per-view is the sweetest feature of ITI InfoCentral for those who don't have access to the databases that offer full documents. A few of the databases offering the same documents that are in ITI InfoCentral archive include Expanded Academic ASAP and InfoTrac from Thomson Gale; Academic Search Elite and Master File Premier from EBSCO; Research Library and ABI/INFORM from ProQuest; and OmniFile and Library & Information Science Full Text from H. W. Wilson. There are four pay-per-view options, the most expensive being the non-subscription based $2.99-per-article charge, which gets you the article lock, stock and barrel. There is no other service that offers a better pay-per-view alternative, i.e. one without commitment.

You can do much worse, however, through document delivery services that charge $10.00 - $12.00 for shipping and handling plus a copyright fee — usually priced on a base fee and a per-page charge and usually (but don't assume this) on the basis of the reasonable fees set by ITI which have not increased for more than a decade.

For the handling charge alone you could instantly buy three or four articles. In case of the largest document delivery service, rush delivery incurs another $10.00 charge and panic delivery comes in with a $20.00 surcharge. While assaying the panic attack, you may start pondering the feasibility of that hefty handling cost when many of the articles of U.S., Canadian and British journals are readily available as PDFs from publishers. Many of them also offer a searchable full-text database of the archive and free abstracts.

The time for experiencing a panic attack is when you are charged the royalty fee on the basis of imaginary page numbers for a large volume order. This has been happening for a long time for some periodicals, especially for articles that are not printed on consecutive pages. I discussed these problems in my Digital Librarianship column in May 2002 (Digital Copyright and Copywrong) published in Computers in Libraries. It was accompanied by a storybook on my eXTRA site, full of depressing examples of royalties from thin air and based on brutally wrong page spreads by the British Library, sciBASE and Infotrieve.

The bad news is that not much has changed as of February 2005. So much for the power of the press. Take Infotrieve as an example of a document delivery company that had the most vigorous and successful PR program when entering into partnership with publishers in this nearly $2 billion per year business of document delivery. The partnerships ensure a constant flow of document delivery requests, with the forms automatically filled in with citation data from hundreds of databases. There is a captive audience at universities for such a convenient service where faculty and graduate students are allocated a document delivery budget for the semester, which they are reimbursed for. Librarians are not involved unless the individual article order is above a limit, say $60.

The partner online search services provide direct links for full documents from their search results lists — no fuss, no muss, no substantial overhead. Good for the goose, good for the gander you might think. Well, not necessarily so. Here is a small example to illustrate the problem.

This screenshot shows three recent articles (each one taking two partial pages) in your Infotrieve shopping basket. Now, before you whip out your credit card, stop and look at what was rung up by Infotrieve.

Infotrieve records claim that one document spreads from pages 17 to 22 (six pages), the other from pages 42 to 48 (seven pages) and the third from pages 17 to 27 (11 pages). It charges a royalty fee of $7.50, $8.00 and $10.00, respectively. The publisher's royalty in this case is $3.50 as a base fee and $0.50 per page. (You can find this information if you care to track it down on your own.) This price was set a long time ago and it has not increased for more than a decade. If you do your math, you realize that $1.00 is gingerly tacked on to each royalty fee. Considering that the number of transactions by Infotrieve is more than a million a year, a dollar here, a dollar there makes up a pretty fund. This may be a special Homeland Security Tax or some other fee, like those that phone companies like to add to your bill. No one is likely to inquire about it, as few users actually know how the royalty is calculated or what the official royalty set by the publisher is.

Furthermore, these royalty fees are on top of the $36.00 in handling fees ($12.00 charged for each of the three documents, even when you order them in one transaction). This runs the total for the three articles up to $61.50. Through InfoCentral, your tab would be only $8.97, and that is without any kind of subscription.

If you have ever looked at Information Today, you know that more than 90% of the articles and columns are about 1,000 words long, printed on one or two pages, which may or may not be adjacent. From that calculation, you can see that Infotrieve calculates the page numbers as if they were consecutive page ranges. This way, instead of charging for two pages, it charges for six, seven and 11 pages for the above articles. You may think that a dollar here and a dollar there is not a big deal when you spend other people's money, but when it is out of your pocket it makes a difference.

True, this drastic page inflation does not happen with every article, so you can't easily tell how much extra you have already been charged. When I complained about this practice, Infotrieve said that it gets the pagination information from a third party — maybe it should consider replacing its partner. As a law student, I learned that this is not a good enough excuse for being overcharged and indeed I was reimbursed. But I venture that the majority of the document delivery customers just accept the price and run with the document.

The beauty of ITI InfoCentral pay-per-view pricing is not only the best unit cost, but also the predictability of the expenses, irrespective of real or imaginary page numbers. The article charge may be as little as $1.00, if you commit yourself to a yearly subscription of $199.95. True, usage is not unlimited — you are entitled to 200 articles. A monthly subscription of $19.95 per month works out to a per-article charge of $1.33, and you are limited to 15 articles. There is also a monthly pass for $9.95 and five articles, which still keeps the cost per article below $2.00.

The Software

There is a reason that the ProQuest Archiver software is so popular with the largest newspapers. The New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, USA Today and many other newspapers chose this software to host their archives. There are also magazines, such as the Atlantic Monthly, Mother Jones and Rolling Stone, that are hosted by ProQuest Archive. With the exception of the BBC's Monitoring series, TV and radio stations have not yet discovered this nifty software for their transcripts archives, even though ProQuest pioneered such databases on CD-ROM more than 10 years ago and more people get their news only from television than ever.

For search options, there are basic and advanced modes. The software provides a smooth search experience offering full-text search along with options to limit the search by author and/or date ranges. You may also limit the search to the headline field, which is newspaper parlance for what you and I may consider the title field for journal articles. I would like to see the same sort options as in the mainstream ProQuest software, as well as an option to limit the search to the document summary (abstract) field. This would help limit the search to records that have abstracts and to strike a good balance between title-only and full-text searches. Searches may also be saved, although this (and purchasing) require registration.

There are no browsing options that I usually find necessary, but the journal names are displayed with a check-box. If a user wants to search by author, he or she is likely to know how to spell the name of, say, Marydee Ojala, Walt Crawford, Barbara Quint or Mick O'Leary, and their names would show up in most searches results in this archive. As for my name, I would appreciate if the 12 Jasco entries were corrected. I should hope that the few users who would care to search by my name would get suspicious (wouldn't they?) when there are no hits for Jasco (which they believe to be my name) and may try Jacso (the correct spelling), never mind the accent.

The help file succinctly illustrates the most essential search commands and provides further details in the same effective style for the Boolean and proximity operators.

One feature I would like to see is assistance in filtering out the very short news items, either in the search phase or the output phase. ProQuest stores the length of the articles (in words) in the records. It used to have an option to limit the search by article length (short, medium and long). There could be a radio button on the search template to exclude very short documents (such as ones below 100 words). Alternatively, when displaying the results list the number of words could be indicated to advise the user instead of the number of the page(s), which is not always informative enough, as even the shortest publicity news items appear as one page. It does help to see Anonymous for those materials, but the same notation sometimes appears when, for example, there is an author for a substantial letter to the editor. In this case, there were three non-anonymous, substantial letters to the editor, totaling close to 1,500 words. These deserve their own records, at least in as much as PR news items do.

Then again, this just shows that there is more content than meets the eye. The most important development of ITI InfoCentral could be the addition of the 20 volumes of the Proceedings of the National Online Meetings that are not available in full text in any database. Adding the full text of the chapters of the highest ranked and very often cited Annual Review of Information Science & Technology published by ITI could be a premium service at a higher rate, especially if the exceptionally well-checked and substantial cited references were enhanced by their DOIs, where applicable.