Re: REQUESTING INFO ON SPIN Jacquelyn Krones 05 Jun 1995 20:24 EST
On Mon, 5 Jun 1995, PETER BARCHER 608-263-2085 wrote: > While it is true that IRIS has updated it's search capabilities and has a WWW > site, it is a poor choice compared to SPIN for a number of reasons. First, > IRIS has only 4 employees, of which only 2 actually manage the database. SPIN > has over twenty employees, and this level of staffing is necessary keep the > information up to date. The QUALITY and accuracy of SPIN's information is far > superior. As someone who has been using BOTH SPIN and IRIS for two years, I would have to say that this argument doesn't hold water. I have had as many problems with SPIN programs being out of date as I have had with IRIS. In fact, out of curiosity, I just ran a search on SPIN to check follow up dates and found several programs that were to have been reviewed in January, March, and April that have not yet been updated. I would do a comparision search, but I can't because IRIS doesn't provide the follow-up date feild. To be fair, from my experience, I'd say they are about the same in terms of having some out of date deadlines listed. Also, we recently had a problem with SPIN where a deadline in SPIN was off by a month and a faculty missed the applying to an IMS program because of it. To err is human and I don't think that even a big staff can help with that. >Second, the SPIN family of products is much more complete, >and the Faculty Match module, which I use, is an ideal way to keep faculty inf ormed. > IRIS has no plans for a product of this type, or for micro versions. Third, > SPIN has 800 number support and highly qualified staff. The gopher version of > SPIN is great, and allows all users who have accounts at your university the > ability to search for grants and fellowships as often as they wish. > We have the faculty match module and I have found it difficult to use as a routine feature. It takes too much time to run the searches and then you have to find a way to parse the results, otherwise you have to run a seperate search for each faculty member. With over 2,200 faculty, it just wasn't feasible for us to use this without some additional programing. As for the SPAS database, I'm probably going to end up creating my own database. A DOS program just doesn't fit with our windows based world at ASU and the thesaurus is too thin to really accurately describe our researcher's interests. If someone is interested in educating Native American Nursing students and we ran a search based on their profile, they get EVERYTHING related to nursing, higher education, and Native Americans. At any rate, keep in mind that I've decided to go with IRIS at this point. I like their pricing policies and love their web site. I thought that it was a little squirrely of SPIN to advertise a WEB site in the NCURA newsletter that DOESN"T have a Web interface to their database. Jacquie Krones Arizona STate University > Peter R. Barcher, Ph.D. > Associate Dean for Research > School of Business > University of Wisconsin - Madison > 975 University Ave. > Madison, WI 53706 > (608) 263-2085 > xxxxxx@bus.wisc.edu >