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| EBSCO - I hate it - Purple Penguin (3/03/2003 12:43:27 AM) |
According to the old Admiral from Ben Hur, it is good to hate - for hate will keep you alive (or something like that). It has only taken one week after returning to uni to discover something that I really hate... EBSCO
EBSCO is an electronic resource that one uses to retrieve electronic versions of journal articles - ie at .PDF or full text .HTML files. It is the same sort of thing as Infotrac, ProCite or any of the other e-journal services that The University of Queensland Library subscribes to. It is similar in the sense that one (in theory) can use it to search for and download electronic journal articles. However, this similarity and potential utility is marred by absolute ineptitude of design and by total uselessness, if you are after a .PDF version of a journal article, that is.
Our very good (and seemingly competent) friends at Infotrac and ProCite have developed a system where you can select the various retrieval options for your desired articles and download with a minimum of fuss. One can select the .PDF version of an article, and by right-clicking and selecting 'Save Target As' set a large file to download in the background while searching for a new article. This is perfect for the majority of home users with a 33.6 or 56K dial-up connection.
The retards at EBSCO, however, have not incorporated this useful feature. Instead, one must wait until the entire .PDF file is fully loaded into the browser's Acrobat Viewer and then save the file from the viewer. This presents a bit of the problem when you are after half a dozen or so articles that are each close to 1MB in size.
EBSCO. I loath it. I despise it. It has only taken one afternoon of irritation to discover that this is possibly the most useless system ever devised for retrieving electronic journals.
Penguin rating: 1 poofteenth (if that) of a turnip.
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Yeah, just wait till you have to write client information documentation in Lotus Notes template-based info repositories, and then try to search for it afterwards. Just wait until you have to get through mountains and mountains of red tape, headers, owner logs, creator and reviewer entries, just so you can create a document with four lines of actual content. Then each reviewer has to approve it before it can be released. Any changes then need to go through a feedback, approval, change, re-approval, then re-release process.
You young-un's don't know how good you'ns got it, nyahear?
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I like notes, especially since Big Blue now own it. If only MS would merge with IBM - this would do poptastic things for my MS shares - whiners like Porcupine have done horrid things to portfolio over the past few years.
What I don't understand about all of this, is what precisely does a turnip have to do with software? This question is probably rhetrotical, so let me ask another, what the fuck is a fucking poofteenth? I am guessing that it is about the same size as my holdings in MS :-)
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