Faculty at Carleton College can access the 1995-98 Science Citation Index CD-ROM's via the campus network. This document is intended to be a brief guide to the technical details of accessing these CD's from faculty office computers. It does not attempt to explain the workings of the software itself, nor how to use it effectively. If you have questions about these issues you will probably want to contact Charlie Priore at the Library. Student access to Science Citation Index will be through several Macs in the library. If a student has a project that requires extended use of SCI especially during times that the Science Library reading room is inaccessible please contact me and we can work out more convenient arrangements.
There are essentially 3 steps to accessing the Science Citation CD-ROM's.
Before you can do any of this for the first time you'll need two files on your local hard drive (you can store them anywhere you like). ISI CD Editions w/ Abstracts is the program itself and ISI CD Editions w/ Abstr Help is the help file the must travel along with it. Contact me (Sean Fox, 4037, sfox) if you don't know where to get a copy of these programs).
To mount the CD's go to the Chooser under the multicolored Apple icon in the upper left of your screen. Select AppleShare, ACNS Servers (in the AppleTalk Zones window) and CARMEN simultaneously and click OK. At this point you will be asked to enter your password if you have not already logged into the "tree". (This is the same password you use to connect to Celeste). In the next window you will see a list of CD available on Carmen. Those whose names start with SCA are the Science Citation Index CDs. We currently have 2 CD's for each year from 1995 through 1998. You must select the CD's in pairs ( e.g. both CD's with 95 in the name) since one CD of the pair contains the index and the other the abstracts. To select multiple CD's (which you'll need to do) click on the name of the CD while holding down the shift (or option) key. You can select all 8 CD's if you like. Once you click OK, icons for each of the CD's you've select should appear on your desktop. Don't bother opening them, there is nothing inside of interest.
Now you can run (simply double-click as always) the ISI CD Editions w/ Abstracts icon (where-ever you've put it). After some brief messages one of three things will happen. If you selected more than one years worth of CD's you will be given a choice of which year to search . Although you can switch back and forth at any time you can't search multiple years simultaneously. (Though you can save a search strategy that was useful on one year's CD's and apply it directly to the other year's) If you only selected one year's worth of CD's you'll have to say OK to a brief licensing message and then you'll be ready to go. The other possibility is that you will get an error message saying no CD's were found. If this happens run through the procedure again from the beginning and then contact me if things are still awry.
Finally, when you are done searching, drag ALL the Carmen icons (there should be between two and eight of them depending on how many years worth you mounted) into the trash. This is VERY IMPORTANT. We have a limited number simultaneous license for Science Citation Index and as long as the icons are on your desktop you are using a license (even if you don't have the search program running!). So, when you are done, drag the icons to the trash. Your colleagues will appreciate it.
Faculty using Windows95 have to access the Science Citation Index through a program delivered over the Novell network. When you log into a machine running Windows 95 with your Netware account two shortcuts will be added to the Start menu. The top of the Start menu will have an option called "NAL Explorer" under which you will find icons labeled SCI 95-96 and SCI 97-98. Selecting either of these will start the Science Ciatation Index search program and ask which year you'd like to search. Limitation in Windows only allow one of these programs (with either the 95 and 96 OR the 97 and 98 databases accessible) to run at a given time. However you can quit one and start another as often as you'd like. As with access from a Mac you can only search one year at a time. However, you can save a given search strategy and (after opening the CD from another year) apply it to another year.
Maintained by Sean
Fox, sfox@carleton.edu
Last updated: Thursday, 31-Aug-2000 12:26:12 CDT