Searching for Marine Information in Bibliographic Online Data Bases

Proliferation of bibliographic information in the last decade makes it difficult for the marine professional to manually search for information. Online data bases, available through commercial vendors, make it possible to search marine topics in a variety of subject fields without undue expenditures of money or time. Eight general marine terms were used to ascertain the number of marine documents in selected non-marine data bases. These data bases covered law, government, business news, patents and social sciences. A sample cross-file search revealed significant results. The data bases did contain marine information even though it is not considered their main strength. Marine professionals should use the cross-file technique to assess the marine information potential of data bases outside their normal consideration.