This week’s posts come from truly gifted professionals of the SLA North Carolina chapter. While each representative has made an effort to keep their topics inline with the central theme of SLA Future Ready 365 blog, you will notice that each post provides a unique perspective and is intended to help a variety of readers that visit the blog. For more information about our members and the North Carolina chapter, be sure to visit ncarolina.sla.org.

Being future ready for ProQuest Dialog means being able to take features from their past products and enhance them for the future.

The web and enhanced graphic user interfaces (GUI) are without question the emphasis for most professional information retrieval services today. As ProQuest Dialog continues to develop its flagship product, many of the strengths in the new product rely on the features offered through the web interface. However, as one of the oldest and authoritative information retrieval services still available, ProQuest Dialog understands that control, precision, and efficiency are common reasons many professional searchers continue to use the legacy command products. This is precisely why in an effort to be future ready ProQuest Dialog continues to offer professional searchers the choice of searching key field codes via the GUI or by commands.

For example, while it is easy enough to search using field codes in the Basic Search field illustrated below,

using the Command line interface, professional searchers can also build their strategy via the GUI and find field codes that can help them search more efficiently through their favorite databases.

Some of the new field codes that ProQuest Dialog offers users for precision command searching are:

First Author searching…

e.g. FAU(Smith, ACM)

Cited reference search…

e.g. REF(American near/2 Medical)

Cited Author search….

e.g.CAU(miller OR smith)

Cited Document Title search….

e.g. CTI(Effects and early life stress)

Cited Publication search….

e.g. CPUB(jama)

Cited Publication Year search….

e.g. AU(Cromity) and CYR(2009)

You can see a list of more field codes available on ProQuest Dialog at:

http://search.proquest.com/professional/help/webframe.html?View_Field_Codes.html

Jamal Cromity has worked in the information industry for over 15 years. He is currently a UX Specialist for ProQuest Dialog and is Associate Editor for the New Review of Information Networking. Jamal holds an MLS from NCCU , an MBA from NYIT and is PM (Pragmatic Marketing) certified. He has received awards and honors from many associations including ALA, SLA, NCSLA, and NCLA.