There has been an explosion of full text electronic journal resources available to libraries in the past year. Many of these are accessible via the Internet, though some are available on CD‐ROM. The Ovid Mental Health Collection is a group of full text journals that is available both on CD‐ROM and on the Internet.
The Ovid Web interface has been ably reviewed by Nancy L. George in Electronic Resources Review 97/110; so I will not repeat that except to say that it is a simple but powerful online interface. Speaking with a company sales representative yielded the information that a new and faster Java‐based searching interface will soon be introduced but the current software will remain in place as well.
That said, the Ovid Mental Health Collection contains the full text of ten of the most important psychiatry journals including the American Journal of Psychiatry, Annual Review of Psychology, Archives of General Psychiatry, British Journal of Psychiatry, Current Opinion in Psychiatry, Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology, Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychological Medicine, Psychosomatic Medicine, and the Year Book of Psychiatry and Applied Mental Health. This database is integrated with two of Ovid’s other indexes so that, if you have their Medline or PsychINFO products, you can connect from either to access the full text of these journals. However, the Mental Health Collection database can be searched and accessed on its own without other indexes.
The Mental Health Collection can be installed using DOS, Windows 3.x, or Windows 95. However tables, diagrams, and photographs cannot be viewed or printed under the DOS interface. Either variety of Windows does give access to those features. The installation requires 10 MB of hard drive space if it is the only Ovid installation. If Ovid software is already installed, The Mental Health Collection only requires an additional 5 MB of space.
The most important hardware requirement is that you have access to more than one CD‐ROM drive from your computer. The database is not able to run using a single drive CD‐ROM because it is split up across two CD‐ROMs to balance the searching load. Thus, it is best used from a network though it can be used on a standalone PC with multiple drives attached. In addition, while the version reviewed here was distributed on two CD‐ROMs, the sales representative I spoke to mentioned it will soon grow to three. The database is currently being updated monthly on CD‐ROM and may be updated more frequently on the Internet.
The search interface is beautifully simple and straightforward so that even novice computer users should be able to understand it easily. The search software is also remarkably fast. Even a fairly common keyword that generates a large result is returned almost instantly. (And this review was done on an older and fairly slow 486/66 PC with Windows 95 and running the CD‐ROMs across a network.) One can search by author, journal, or keyword and easily limit or combine search results. Printing and downloading results are also simple tasks.
Calling technical support produced the usual result of having to leave a voice mail message and hoping for the best. After a wait of 45 minutes, I received a return call. The technical support person was quite helpful and knowledgeable. My problem was solved within moments.
There was a slightly different result from my call to the sales department. A call to request information regarding the pricing of the database resulted in a three day wait for a return call. After the lengthy delay, the sales representative was helpful and courteous; but he didn’t have all the information I needed. The message I left requested pricing information for the CD‐ROM and Internet access. The salesperson only had the CD‐ROM pricing but offered to have another representative call me who was more familiar with Internet pricing. I received that call a day later and got the rest of the information.
For some reason, this seems to be a common practice in the electronic information access business, i.e., making pricing information difficult to obtain. While these companies seem eager to have you access their web sites, many are uneasy about putting up some of the most important data (pricing) there. Here is my plea to those companies. You can’t keep those high prices secret forever so why not just tell us up front? Don’t make us beg for the information. And if you still feel you can’t put the prices on your web site, at least make sure all your salespeople have the information and return phone calls promptly.
All ranting aside, the price for a standalone CD‐ROM subscription to the Mental Health Collection is only a few hundred dollars more than the price of the individual paper subscriptions to the journals. Network and web access are much more expensive. There are many questions to be considered when a library decides to move to electronic access of journals, not the least of which is the archiving issue. But that discussion is outside the scope of this review. Each library will have to make its own decision about how and when to begin accessing full text journal articles in electronic format, but if and when you are ready to make the move, I recommend this database for libraries with concentrations in clinical psychology, counseling, psychiatry, or medicine.
