About InfoTree: Introduction

This page contains a general overview of InfoTree. You may also want to look at some of the specific pages listed here:

What is InfoTree?

InfoTree is a user-friendly starting point for research. It is a subject-oriented gateway to research tools of various kinds. It is browseable in a subject hierarchy or searchable by keywords. The primary audience for the database is the students, faculty, and staff of Ohio University. Our chief aim is to support the research needs of this audience.

At its core, InfoTree includes all electronic resources (other than individual electronic journals and books) that either Ohio University or OhioLINK receive by subscription. It will also include other resources chosen by the Libraries Subject Bibliographers as being especially useful for academic research. This includes types of sources such as:

Databases of various kinds, including web search engines
Printed books, chosen by librarians for their outstanding research value
Research Guides, a reincarnation of the Subject Guides on our old website
Electronic reference tools (dictionaries, encyclopedias, directories, etc.)
Electronic journal collections (individual journals are listed on ALICE)
Websites of all kinds, chosen by librarians for their research potential
Links to ALICE records of important printed materials in our collections
Sets of research materials in microform, some of which are not listed on ALICE
... and last but not least, librarians who work as subject bibliographers

Why the change from the old web pages?

As the number of databases and other electronic resources grew over the years, our site became very complex for both researchers to use and librarians to maintain. With our previous site design, there were too many different places to look for information tools. The old site had separate sections for articles, books, reference tools, web searching, subject guides and the like -- to say nothing of many valuable resources that were "buried" within the pages about various Library departments.

Furthermore, if you were looking for a specific resource, the old "Site Search" was not as precise as InfoTree's search function, which will let you find what you need much more effectively.

What is the relationship between InfoTree and the rest of the Libraries web pages?

There are now three major and very different library systems:

The Libraries' Home Page: Contains information about the Libraries, their collections, services, hours and phone numbers, staff, etc. Some of the pages for the departments in the Libraries have links to research materials, but most of those materials are more readily findable in InfoTree.
ALICE Online Catalog: Comprehensive database for the Libraries' collections. It contains records for several million individual books, journals, videotapes,CD-ROMs, and other items in the Libraries' collections, as well as external databases and websites. It includes both Athens and regional campuses. See the longer description on our What is ALICE? page
InfoTree Subject Gateway to Research: InfoTree is a user-friendly starting point for research. It offers a smaller number of high-quality tools to help you learn the basics about a subject, and find out which of the millions of items in ALICE are right for your research needs. InfoTree is also browseable by subject or type of material in ways that ALICE is not.