Zoological Record on Compact Disc Ratings: Ease of Installation **** Ease of Use ** Product Support **** Overall Value **** Product: Zoological Record on Compact Disc Search Software: PC-SPIRS (SilverPlatter Information Retrieval System), version 3.21a5 was reviewed. MacSPIRS for Macintosh also available. System Requirements: PC and Macintosh products are available. Minimum PC requirements are: DOS-compatible computer with DOS version 3.1 or higher, 640K RAM with 500K of free RAM, hard disk drive with 650K available for PC-SPIRS software and 2.5MB available for temporary storage of search data, MS-DOS CD-ROM Extensions version 2.0 or higher, ISO 9660-compatible CD-ROM drive, monochrome or color monitor, and a floppy disk drive. Minimum Macintosh requirements are: Macintosh Plus, 2MB memory, monochrome or color monitor, System 6.0.3 or higher, 20MB hard disk or larger, ISO 9660-compatible CD-ROM drive, and a floppy disk drive. Price: For Zoological Record print subscribers, Volume 130 (on one disc) costs $900 (US) or $995 (non-US) with quarterly updates. For non-print subscribers, Volume 130 (on one disc) costs $3,080 (US) or $3,380 (non-US) with quarterly updates. For Zoological Record print subscribers of at least nine back volumes, Volumes 115-129 (on two discs) costs $6,700 (US) or $7,370 (non-US). For non-print subscribers or subscribers to fewer than nine print back volumes, Volume 115-129 (on two discs) costs $10,100 (US) or $11,090 (non-US). For More Information, Contact: SilverPlatter Information, 100 River Ridge, Norwood MA 02062-5026 USA. 617/769-2599, 800/343-0064, Fax: 617/769-8763. Intended Audience: Anyone interested in citations to the zoological literature. Audience will primarily be college and university but will also include zoo, wildlife and aquarium professionals, wildlife photographers, and nonprofessional enthusiasts/breeders of birds, reptiles including snakes, amphibians, insects, fish, coral, etc. Description: Need citations to the research literature on zoology? Zoological Record (ZR) is the preeminent index to that literature and accesses over 1.1 million citations without abstracts. ZR attempts to comprehensively reference such facets of the zoological literature as behavior, ecology, physiology, taxonomy, evolution, life history, morphology, and reproduction. More experimental topics such as biochemistry, immunology and toxicology are covered selectively. ZR currently indexes books, reports, meeting proceedings, and approximately 6,500 periodicals including popular periodicals and newsletters. ZR's international coverage is one of its strengths. For Volume 128, 49% of the periodicals originated in Europe and the Middle East, 21% in North America, 22% in Asia and Australasia, 5% in Central and South America, and 3% in Africa. ZR's closest rival in zoological coverage is Biological Abstracts (BA) which has the advantage of abstracts. Comparing one volume of ZR to BA for each animal group, ZR offered 25% -70% unique references (Chisman, 1989). For example, in that one volume, ZR had 272 (70%) bird references and 172 (45%) fish references that were not in BA. ZR uses the familiar PC-SPIRS software by SilverPlatter and ZR will integrate well into college and university libraries using other SilverPlatter products. Reviewed previously, most library users will be familiar with PC-SPIRS. As contemporary non-Windows DOS software goes, PC-SPIRS' appearance is substandard and it is not intuitive in use. The opening FIND screen lacks prompting text that tells a novice user how to start searching. Instead it tells the user how to invoke online help for guidance; a significant percentage of novice users ask support staff for assistance rather than reading online help. Far better would be to display basic how-to-search information on PC-SPIRS' FIND screen as does NISC's ROMWright software on its equivalent of the FIND screen. Worth noting is that SilverPlatter fixed successive display of references with this version of PC- SPIRS. References will display one after another with the title of each reference appearing at the top of the screen as the user presses CTRL and PgDn keys simultaneously. How does the user find out about this critical CTRL/PgDn capability? Read the manual or ask support staff; no prompting appears onscreen. Version 3.21a5 of PC-SPIRS improves disc swapping so that the Xchange command is not needed. Simply eject a disc and insert a new one; PC-SPIRS automatically detects the change and resets itself for the new disc! SilverPlatter put ZR's thesaurus on disc! Since ZR does not have abstracts, utilization of thesaurus terms in combination with title keywords is essential for comprehensive retrieval. Subject terms, taxonomy, geography (including zoogeographical regions like Nearctic Region), and geological time periods can be browsed and displayed in ZR's tree-structured hierarchical thesaurus. Terms that are broader or more specific than the entry term can be readily identified. Scope notes that describe the use of specific thesaurus terms can be displayed. All of the specific terms under a broad term can be selected through a one-step explode feature as if one had typed in all those terms separately! For example, exploding on marine habitat retrieves all references indexed with more specific subject headings like hydrothermal vent, lagoon habitat, marine shore habitat, beach, tide pool, reef habitat, sea ice habitat, surf, etc. Exploding on subject and geographical terms makes ZR much easier to use for comprehensive retrieval of broader topics. British spellings are used in the thesaurus (ie behaviour, colour, Caenozoic, haemocytes) which makes the thesaurus an occasional obstacle to Americans. If "behavior" or "feeding behavior" is searched in the thesaurus, one sees the British equivalents since those terms are nearby in the index. However searching Cenozoic in the thesaurus does not reveal the preferred spelling, Caenozoic. For users searching Americanized words through FIND, search results will be limited to title keywords if proper British spelling is not used; the critical benefit of thesaurus terms for assisting retrieval will not be utilized. ZR would benefit from value- added processing to enhance records with Americanized spellings in addition to the British spellings. ZR's greatest strength has always been its incredible taxonomic indexing wherein all species in each reference are indexed at every level of their taxonomic hierarchy. Taxonomic terms can be browsed through ZR's thesaurus feature; this is useful to verify spelling of taxonomic terms. However taxonomic searches are usually best accomplished as FIND searches and not as exploded thesaurus searches for reasons of speed and recall. Since each reference's indexing includes the complete taxonomic hierarchy, it is faster to search directly on a specific level of the taxonomic hierarchy in order to retrieve all of the references down to the species level. For example, on a 486 microcomputer with a single-speed CD-ROM drive and the 1993 ZR volume, a FIND search on the class COPEPODA took 1 second and an exploded thesaurus consumed 15 seconds. The FIND search retrieved three more relevant references than the exploded search. ZR will be indispensable to libraries that were already subscribers to most or all sections of the print version. However its market is broader than that. SilverPlatter's next step should be to produce phylum-specific or aggregate products like the print subscriptions eg non-Insect ZR, mammal ZR, and bird ZR. More price points would be available thereby bringing ZR into the reach of more budgets particularly smaller non-profits like museums and zoos. - Peter Brueggeman, Public Services Librarian, Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library, University of California San Diego, San Diego, California. Chisan, Janet K. "Zoological Record, Biological Abstracts and Biological Abstracts/RRM: a comparison of overlap" RQ 29(2):242-247, Winter 1989.