Submitted by Laura Marlane.

The Group Purchasing Committee met on Wednesday, January 11th at the Central Falls Library.  Jenifer Bond, Dorey Conway, Diane Hogan, Maureen Delovio, Pat LaRose, Chris Jeffers and Laura Marlane were in attendance.  

The discussion centered on an evaluation of the Gale and Ebsco packages and a decision between the two.  The committee decided that further comparison was needed and agreed that the following criteria would be used:

• Full-text availability (including the extent of full-text in the backfiles)
• Comparison of keyword and subject searching between the database packages
• Ease of use
• The relevancy of hits to the search topic (is it current and authoritative)

The members of the committee will be performing a minimum of ten different searches and comparing the results received from the different packages. We will post this information to the message board to allow others to do the same and email us their evaluation of the products so that at our next meeting we can make a vendor recommendation to CLAN.

The committee will meet again on Wednesday, February 8th at 9:30 a.m. at the West Warwick Public Library.