Office of Learning Technologies Literature Database

Citation

Grafstein, A. (2001), "Office of Learning Technologies Literature Database", Online Information Review, Vol. 25 No. 4, pp. 271-279. https://doi.org/10.1108/oir.2001.25.4.271.10

The Office of Learning Technologies (OLT) was established in 1996 by the Canadian Federal Government within Human Resources Development Canada. Its mandate is to foster and promote a culture of lifelong learning in Canada. The OLT Web site offers a variety of resources and information for various partners in the learning technologies enterprise, including developers, instructors, learners and community learning networks.

The Literature Database is one of four databases that are accessible through the site’s library. On the library site, the Literature Database is described as having 350,000 references and links to 500 full‐text online documents that were published from the mid 1980s on. The scope of these documents is unclear, beyond the fact that they presumably relate in some way to learning technologies. It is not stated anywhere how often the database is updated.

On entering the Literature Database, users can click the help key to learn that the database is a database of books, periodical articles, research reports, etc., on topics related to learning technologies. The documents come from ERIC, Canadian Education Index, ONTERIS (a database from the Ontario Ministry of Education and Training), AMICUS (the information system of the National Library of Canada), the US Library of Congress, and catalogued Internet sites and documents.

On following the link to the Literature Database, users are presented with a search screen with four boxes with separate labels: keywords, titles, authors, and subjects. For users accustomed to standard Boolean searching, this database holds some surprises. In order to specify the AND relation between terms, users must simply string terms together. For example, “librarians university teaching” is equivalent to placing an AND between each term. There is no apparent way of specifying adjacency except in Expert Search, as discussed below. The OR relationship is specified by semicolons. “Colleges; universities” is equivalent to placing an OR between the terms. Additionally, there is no way of nesting a search using parentheses. It is possible to limit results by document type, publication year and language.

The only way to find out about this non‐standard way of combining terms is by going into help. Simply assuming a standard search syntax will lead to incorrect results, since the software treats the actual Boolean operators as textual material.

There is an Expert Search button that links to a single blank search bar. There are instructions below it to enter combinations of words from documents or specific fields. Some examples are given there, along with instructions to click on help for information about search syntax. Expert Search allows greater flexibility. It supports standard Boolean searching as well as nesting, for example, “(colleges or universities) and libraries”.

OLT’s Literature Database is clearly intended for Canadians. It includes citations from several Canadian indexes. One might wonder, therefore, how useful the database is outside of the Canadian context. However, most of the citations that I retrieved in a variety of searches came from the ERIC database, which can be searched from anywhere for free. For this reason, in addition to the rather non‐standard searching software, the Literature Database would appear to be of limited usefulness.