Robbins Library Notes

Good morning! As long promised, here is a review of the database, POIESIS.

What it is

As the Web site description notes, POIESIS is “a subscription based reference and publishing service offering searchable access to the full text of hundreds of current, recent, and back issues of a growing number of philosophy journals and series…. POIESIS now contains over 2,400 issues and 350,000 pages of text from 55 journals and series, and most of these are not available in electronic format from any other service. Put another way, the project currently contains the complete content of approximately 36,000 articles and reviews. POIESIS will ultimately contain the fulltext of 100 journals and series, and more than 70 journals have already been licensed for the project.”

Strengths

• POIESIS contains current issues of journals like Philosophical Review, Hume Studies, Leibniz Review, and Philosophical Topics. These are journal issues to which Harvard has not previously had electronic access. Furthermore, there is access to the Table of Contents to current issues of the Journal of Philosophy, though not access to the full-text of articles.

Limitations

• Interface: One of the big limitations to POIESIS is the interface. It is not easy to read or navigate, nor is the full-text of articles formatted in an easy-to-read or easy-to-print format. In fact, full-text articles return only the words, not the formatting, of the original article.
• Printing: A further issue is that clicking on “print article” returns only a dark browser window with an error message. I’ve reported the problem to the database maintainers, but the matter has not been resolved as of the time of this writing. For now, to print off an article, you will have to copy and paste the text into Word or other word processing software, and clean up the formatting. Note that you may have to scroll through several pages and do this, depending on the length of the article.
• Searching: When you use the “Power Search” (i.e., advanced search), not all of the journals to which we have access appear in the “Select title to search” box. However, if you search using the other fields, articles in these journals will appear. So, don’t worry if you don’t see the journal you want listed — search by author or title instead. I’ll discuss this more in the next section.
• I’ve also noticed that, when searching after logging into the database, that you will occasionally reach a page where you get a message that you are no longer logged in, and cannot access the materials in question. I’m not sure why this happens. My recommendation is to document all these issues and send them to the POIESIS managers directly.

Using POIESIS

1. Go to the HOLLIS search page, and select the “Digital Resources” tab.
2. Set the “Search type” to “Title beginning with,” and the search terms to “poiesis.”
3. In the results list, scroll down to “POIESIS,” and click on that link. (You can also select “POIESIS : Philosophy online serials,” which is an alternate entry.
4. Clink on the Internet link in the record, and login with your ID and PIN.
5. Once you’ve logged in, I strongly recommend that you read the introduction to the database. There is also a blue information icon — — on most pages, which will provide guidance if you get stuck.
6. Searching. There are four search options:
   1. Keyword Search (default) – this is a standard keyword search, with the option to search all or one journal at a time.
   2. Power Search – this is the advanced search option. Here, you have the option to limit your search by keyword, word proximity (i.e., word x and word y within z number of each other), or journal title(s) — though not all journals are included in this list, as noted above. You also have the option of setting up a Boolean search strategy. This is helpful for searching the full-text of articles.
   3. Author/Title Search — this is an alternative advanced search option, which allows you to search by author and/or article title, and/or journal title(s), but, as with the Power Search, not all the journal titles are listed in the drop-down menu. You can set up a Boolean search with this option as well.
   4. Browse – this allows you to browse through a list of journal titles. In the left-hand frame, you should see a list of the subscribed volumes of the journal you select. Click on the “+” to the left of each volume to expand out the available issues. In the right-hand frame, the article(s) should appear. You’ll be able to navigate through the pages there.
   5. I’ve just noticed that a complete list of subscribed journals appears when you access the various search options other than Keyword Search under the heading “Subscription Journals,” which is on the left-hand side of the home page. I’m not sure why there are two different listings, but, to save yourself frustration, perhaps it’s best to access the search options from this area, rather than from the home page, so that you are not denied access for “not being logged in.”
7. Viewing and Printing. As I noted above in the Limitations section, the formatting of articles in POIESIS is not the best. There is no option to retrieve a PDF version of an article, and printing is, for the moment, clumsy, and does not preserve the original format and layout of the article.

Summary

In spite of its clunky interface and output formatting, POIESIS is a valuable resource to use in conjunction with databases like JSTOR, Academic Search Premier, and Project MUSE. It’s the only place to obtain articles from journals like Philosophical Topics, Philosophical Review, and the like. Hopefully, in the future, a much-better interface will be designed. Until then, it will have to do.

Do you have a database that you’d like to see me review? Please drop me a line or fill out a comment and let me know.