Several recent studies of the reactions of library users to online patron access catalogs emphasize the extent to which they express the desire for access to more and more information; information such as the contents pages of monographs, entries in back of the book indexes, etc. Superindex, an online guide to major science and medical reference works, provides such information. The system combines the page-oriented subject indexing of reference books with the key word principle of computer searching.
Superindex has been available on BRS since July 1983 and is now used by 800 libraries. Thirty-three major publishers participate, including the American Chemical Society, Elsevier, McGraw Hill, Excerpta Medica, McMillan, Prentice Hall, and Oxford University Press. The Superindex file contains some 3 million index entries from more than 3,000 major reference works in science and medicine.
The company has a number of ideas for product expansion. These include the extension of the service to cover monographic reference works in other subject areas--business, economics, banking, finance and taxation, law, demographics and the social sciences; and the extension of the service to cover journals--Superindex staff would page index some one hundred journal titles using techniques similar to those used in the compilation of indexes for monographs. The company envisions future spinoffs from the page indexing of journals such as page-by-page subject indexes for specific journal titles.
