Bryan Glastonbury is a Research Professor at the Centre for Human Service Technology.

Contact him at:

CHST,
School of Social Sciences,
University of Southampton,
Southampton. SO17 1BJ
UK

Available from:

NASW Press,
POB 431,
Annapolis JCY,
MD 20701,
USA.

This CD-ROM is a data set based on three published US reference works (1995 editions):

Encyclopedia of Social Work (19th Edition - Editor-in-Chief Richard L. Edwards)

The Social Work Dictionary (3rd Edition - Robert L Barker)

Social Work Almanac (2nd Edition - Leon Ginsderg)

The data set is stated as containing the equivalent of 4,000 printed pages, and operates in the context of a search engine called Folio VIEWS 3.1.

The Social Work Reference Library

Reviewed by Bryan Glastonbury

Platform and technical details

The CD is designed to run on a Macintosh or a PC with Windows (though it can be made to function on DOS). The review was carried out using Windows 3.1. Price is $275 for a single user version, plus 10% postage and handling. A short manual is included, along with a Quick Reference Card. It is adequate rather than comprehensive, but there is on-line help as well.

The program loads easily from CD, and can be installed wholly on the PC’s hard disk, or run partly from the CD. The look and feel is typical of a Windows 3 package, with a top line of pull-down menus and a ‘Toolbelt’ of user-selectable click-on icons down the left of the screen. The contents can be scrolled through as a single very long document, including a facility to block, copy and paste script to a number of word processors, but the intention is that the user should employ the search engine to interrogate the data set. The core of this is a key word search, handled in the usual way by typing in words or phrases with Boolean operators. A range of additional facilities are available, such as establishing hypertext links, tagging, highlighting, creating subsets (search groups), and others, all functioning through the click-on icons. Overall these processes work smoothly and quickly, and anyone with reasonable familiarity with the Windows 3 environment will have no difficulty becoming a proficient user in a relatively short time.

Content

The content covers three broad areas - bibliography, dictionary and facts / figures about major social issues and provisions. These reflect the core aims of the three reference works which make up the package. However, the material can be used in various alternative ways, for example to access biographies of key figures in social work and social policy, scan essays on important topics, or find the full name of acronyms. Inevitably the focus of the content is on the USA, but there is a significant and useful amount of comparative material. Searching on ‘Britain’, for example, offers 58 entries, and takes the user into some informative overviews of North American and European social work developments. For a general user the historical perspective is also valuable, both in the review articles and the biographies, with a substantial coverage of social policy as well as social work / services.

Coverage of information technology is primarily through two substantial papers. William H. Butterfield offers a review of computer use in US social services agencies, ranging over the full span of professional, administrative and managerial applications, as well as offering an extensive US bibliography. Dick Schoech has a paper on information systems which is thinner on the bibliographic side, but stronger on the theoretical and international dimensions. Both provide excellent overviews of developments.

Given that this CD-ROM sets out to be a US resource it is pleasantly wide-ranging in its appeal, and certainly has valuable contents for the European user. The search engine makes it easy to access, and offers real added value to the printed versions of the three reference works. For the individual purchaser it is expensive, but as a resource for a social work or social policy course it should be highly effective, and definitely worth ensuring student access.


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The journal has now ceased publication (2003)