The National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect Information is a national resource for professionals seeking information on the prevention, identification, and treatment of child abuse and neglect and related child welfare issues. The Documents Database, the main index to citations, contains more than 27,000 records on various issues of child abuse and neglect and child welfare from the early 1920s to the present. While most of the material indexed is related only to the USA, there is a selection of items from international sources. Owing to the years of coverage, this database has been a relevant academic resource for many years. Along with the documents database, the site provides access to the National Organizations Database and the 1998 edition of the Child Abuse and Neglect Thesaurus.
The search software provided in the documents database is quite comprehensive, providing many different access points. The main search screen allows you to begin searching by keyword or fulltext in a basic search textbox. Access is provided to a thesaurus of keywords through which you can browse and select terms to search. The system also allows combining terms by including and excluding keywords. Basically, you don’t need to understand the use of Boolean logic; you simply put the necessary key terms to include or exclude in the appropriate boxes. Searching for terms in the title and author fields is yet another option. An author index is also searchable. Publication year is searchable by a specific year or range of years. A list of 20 document type options is available, the default being all types. For better ease of use, I recommend that the search and display screens be made to fit on to a 15‐inch monitor. Having to scroll from the left and right of the search screen is rather irritating.
Search results can be retrieved in blocks of 150 or 300 up to a maximum of 3,000. The first results screen is a simple display of titles listed alphabetically. The screen displays ten records at a time. To retrieve the full record for the citations, you do need to scroll to the top of the page and select full display. Once this is selected, all records retrieved during your search sessions will be displayed in full. The full display should be repeated at the bottom of the title display for easier manipulation, and the option to display the full record for a single item would be a user‐friendly option to add. Each full display record includes the basic citation of author, title, publication, and journal information. Details about where to obtain a copy of the item, a detailed abstract and a list of the descriptors used for that citation are also provided. The keywords from the initial search are in bold type.
Saving or capturing search results appears to rely entirely upon the basic functions of your browser software. File, save as appears to be the only way to capture the data to disk. Because the citations are in courier font, downloading this way should not be a problem. E‐mail and download functions within the actual database would be very good additions.
Help screens are provided throughout the various pages and are context sensitive. A Guide to Searching the Documents Database, including tips for searching, specifics on keyword searching and limiting your search, is also provided on the main Web page before you actually begin searching the database. The information provided is understandable but a bit bland to read through. Perhaps a few screen dumps illustrating examples or a few graphics would break up the information provided.
The organizations database consists of descriptions of “129 national organizations that focus on child abuse and neglect or child welfare issues, have a significant child abuse and neglect/child welfare component, or have a related primary focus but can provide some information to the field”. Federal agencies, regional or local organizations, survivor groups, treatment programs, foreign organizations, or religious organizations are excluded from this list. For each entry detailed information is provided “including a brief description of the organization, the subject areas on which it focuses, its target audience, and the products and services it offers”.
The Child Abuse and Neglect Thesaurus allows you to pick and choose the proper subject headings to put into the search box leaving much of the guesswork out of your search structure. Narrower, broader and related terms are also provided. While the proper terms are available in the database in the keyword thesaurus, it would be beneficial to have access to the actual thesaurus in the documents database.
Overall, this product is simple and retrieves relevant records quite effectively. I would recommend bookmarking this site from the Web site of any academic institution which offers courses related to this subject area.
