Dear Hasafran members, A librarian at the University of Maryland asked lately: "Can someone explain to me the merits of this database and how it differs from RAMBI?"
Let me try to shed some light on the matter. The Index to Hebrew Periodicals (IHP) is an online bibliographic index that includes major Hebrew journals from 1977 to date. In general, indexing is cover to cover. While RAMBI centers on "research on the Jewish people and Eretz Israel", the IHP covers a large variety of subjects, with an emphasis on Judaica, history, literature, education, art, law and current Israeli affairs (politics and society), but also covers articles on computers, geography, travel, popular science, etc. The database currently contains over 730,000 records. It includes 460,000 articles from about 1000 Hebrew periodicals, collections, monographs, as well as articles in other languages dealing with the land of Israel. The database includes scholarly and popular materials (but offers the user a choice searching in the whole database or just in scholarly and/or professional articles) and therefore the overlap with RAMBI is minimal. Currently, about 15,000 articles a year are added to the IHP from about 400 current periodicals. At present, nearly 23,000 bibliographic records are linked to full text articles. The Eretz Israel database, which is a sub-database included in the IHP, complements the Index to Hebrew Periodicals with additional pre-1977 material relating to Zionism, history, literature, geography, archaeology of the land of Israel. It includes Hebrew and non-Hebrew articles of all periods, and a number of books, collections, pamphlets and reports in Hebrew and English and French. The IHP also contains about 270,000 bibliographic records of selected articles from major Israeli Hebrew newspapers from the years 1985-2005. The search options in the IHP are similar to those in RAMBI since both use Aleph software. In addition, the IHP subjects are based on a very comprehensive thesaurus of Hebrew terms. Subjects are interrelated, using the standard broad/narrow/related terms as well as see references. To sum up, RAMBI and the Index to Hebrew Periodicals are complementary bibliographic databases. RAMBI is quite selective and more research oriented. The Index to Hebrew Periodicals is much more comprehensive. The IHP has scope notes and many links to full text. RAMBI uses subject headings, the Index uses subject headings based on a thesaurus. RAMBI is free, the IHP is not. For more information on the IHP <http://lib.haifa.ac.il/www/libinfo/eng/ihp_eng.html>http://lib.haifa.ac.il/www/libinfo/eng/ihp_eng.html Amira Kehat, editor The Index to Hebrew Periodicals, The University of Haifa Library Messages and opinions expressed on Hasafran are those of the individual author and are not necessarily endorsed by the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) =========================================================== Submissions for Ha-Safran, send to: Hasafran @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu SUBscribing, SIGNOFF commands send to: Listproc @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu Questions, problems, complaints, compliments;-) send to: galron.1 @ osu.edu Ha-Safran Archives: Current: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/maillist.html History: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/history.html AJL HomePage http://www.JewishLibraries.org
