Tag Archives: databases

Disability Pride Month: Library Edition

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This month we celebrate Disability Pride Month, marking the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) being signed into law by President George HW Bush on July 26, 1990.

Nearly 1 in 4 Americans live with some type of disability, and despite nearly 40 years since the ADA’s passage, many Americans with disabilities still live with significant barriers to living their lives to their fullest. Barriers can be physical, such lack of ramps, elevators, and ADA-compliant spaces. But they can also be less visible, including design and function of technology.

Accessible Library Resources

As library resources shifted to a predominantly digital format, the importance of these resources providing accessible and inclusive information for users of all abilities has become even more vital.

The Rehabilitation Act of 1978 defines and protects the same individuals as the ADA, but covers a different scope. In 1998, it was amended to include Section 508, which focused on the accessibility of electronic and information technology products and services that federal agencies buy, create and use.

Section 508 mandates that individuals with disabilities have access to information and services that is comparable to the access and use available to non-disabled individuals. It also provides guidelines to follow to ensure electronic resources are accessible, including making websites and apps accessible to assistive technologies (screen readers, alternative mouse and keyboard devices like motion trackers, magnification software, etc).

The Library Accessibility Alliance (LAA) is an organization made up of multiple library consortia across the country that advocates for improving library e-resource accessibility and shifting library culture to one that promotes justice and inclusion for people with disabilities. The group provides independent accessibility evaluations of library resources, training and toolkits for libraries and librarians, as well as specific licensing language for libraries to use or adapt to address concerns with electronic resources vendors.

LAA hosts a searchable database of independent evaluations of over 100 electronic resources.

ADA Compliance Tools

Vendors are recommended to provide documentation that shows how their hardware or software is accessible.

An Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR) is a document that explains how information and communication technology (ICT) products such as software, hardware, electronic content, and support documentation meet (conform to) the Revised 508 Standards for IT accessibility. Use the ACR to make specific statements in simple recommended language to demonstrate how the features and functional characteristics of your product meet the Section 508 standards.

There are multiple products and tools available to help create ACRs, including the VPAT.

Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT™)

Vendors that offer software, hardware or electronic content can voluntarily provide a VPAT™ that discloses how they support accessibility guidelines. The VPAT™ outlines the Revised Section 508 Standards for accessibility, and allows vendors to indicate their conformance with each standard. 

However, even if a vendor provides a VPAT™, it doesn’t guarantee that the vendor’s resource is actually Section 508 or ADA compliant.

W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

WCAG are guidelines and criteria produced by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) to ensure that websites and electronic content are accessible to all. They provide quantitative means of evaluating websites for accessibility, and should be used by both developers and content creators.

There are currently two standards in use today: WCAG 2.0 and WCAG 2.1 which added additional criteria to address accessibility for mobile devices, people with low vision, and people with cognitive disabilities. 

Popular Biomedical Resources: ADA Compliance

If you are interested in learning more about different resources and their ADA compliance status, see the lists below which feature some of the MSK Library’s most popular resources.

Literature Databases

Citation Management tools

Clinical Databases

What’s NOT: More About the Boolean Operator “NOT”

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Boolean Operators (AND, OR, NOT) are tools for combining search terms and are inherent part of online database searching. While experienced searchers will use Boolean Operators directly in their search strategies, even novice searchers that just enter a string of terms into a database’s search box will end up indirectly using the Boolean operator AND, as each space between words will be treated by the database as AND, thus combining each term together into a search strategy that would retrieve results that have all terms present.

Image Source: https://sru.libguides.com/english/librarybasics/booleanoperators

Most search strategies will either use just AND or a combination of both AND and OR. The third Boolean operator, NOT, is much more complicated and requires some understanding to use properly in a search.

Using the Boolean Operator NOT

The Boolean operator NOT can be used when a term or terms needs to be excluded from your search strategy.

For example, if you were interested in articles that looked at children with cancer, but you did not want articles that looked specifically at infants, you could create a search strategy like this:

cancer AND child* NOT infant*
— or —
(cancer AND child*) NOT infant*

The Problem with NOT

When using the Boolean operator NOT to exclude terms, it can become problematic when the database excludes records that contain both the term(s) you want to exclude and the term(s) you want in your search.

In the above example, not only articles about cancer in infants will be excluded from the results but it will also exclude any articles about cancer in both children and infants.

Information professionals (librarians and informationists) advise using the Boolean operator NOT with extreme caution when conducting searches. It’s better to reach out to an information professional for assistance with complex search techniques and how to best proceed with a search when there is a term you want to avoid.

Variations Across Databases

Not all databases function the same way, and using the Boolean operator NOT is no different. While most databases allow for using simply NOT to exclude terms, depending on the database or platform, you might need to use the operator AND NOT instead (Scopus), or once the search is performed use the Exclude button found within the Refine Search panel (also in Scopus).

Takeaway

The Boolean operator NOT should be used with extreme caution. It is best to consult a Librarian on its use in your search.

Searching with Field Codes

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While not necessarily “secret”, field codes are an underutilized feature found in nearly all scholarly literature databases. 

A field is a specific part of a record found within a database. A field code (also sometimes referred to as a field tag) is a word, abbreviation, or letters that are tied to a specific field within a record. Some common examples of fields are: title, author, and publication year. Every database has their own set of field codes for the various fields found in their records. Here we discuss how you can leverage these field codes to focus your literature searches.

Adding Field Codes to your Search

The default, or basic search, in most databases, is a general all field or keyword search. While this may be fine for simple searches, as searches become more complex, sometimes there needs to be more options available. That is where field codes come in.

The Advanced Search features found in most databases is where you can manipulate your search strategies to include field codes. In some cases available or common field codes are listed on this page. Depending on the database, you may or may not be able to add multiple field codes to a single search. If you are limited to a single field code, use the Boolean Operator OR to combine multiple search strings. 

Commonly Used Field Codes in Select Databases

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