Of Masques and Databases: Access in the Work-at-Home Environment

 The red death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous ... But Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his crenellated abbeys. --- Edgar Allen Poe, Masque of the Red Death (1842)

COVID has a lot of us working from home. To perform that work effectively, we need access to the same resources we had access to in the office.

Commercial databases like ProQuest Dialog (https://dialog.com/ , Lexis Nexis (https://www.lexisnexis.com/ ), IHS Global Standards (https://global.ihs.com/ ) and ScienceDirect (https://www.sciencedirect.com/ ) are among those resources that you and your colleagues may need to use in your work.

As Aramco Services Company-ASC librarian, one of my duties was to administer site license agreements with these database providers. Each vendor had its own rules as to who could access the resource, and the location from which they could access it.

With COVID-19, many vendors have adjusted their access rules to accommodate work-from-home.

If your company subscribes to any commercial databases, it might be worth your while to contact the sales rep of each organization to see what they can offer in terms of licensing their products to off-site workers.

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Jean Steinhardt served as Librarian, Aramco Services, Engineering Division, for 13 years. He now heads Jean Steinhardt Consulting LLC, producing the same high quality research that he performed for Aramco.

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Email Jean at research@jeansteinhardtconsulting.com  with questions on research, training, or anything else
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