Expanded Academic
| Producer | Gale (United States) |
|---|---|
| History | 1985 to present |
| Languages | primarily English |
| Access | |
| Cost | subscriptions |
| Coverage | |
| Record depth | Index, abstract & full-text |
| No. of records | over 20 million |
| Links | |
InfoTrac is a family of full text databases of content from academic journals and general magazines, of which the majority are targeted to the English-speaking North American market. As is typical of online proprietary databases, various forms of authentication are used to verify affiliation with subscribing academic, public, and school libraries. InfoTrac databases are published by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning.
In the mid-1980s, InfoTrac databases were originally published by Information Access Company (IAC) on CD-ROMs which were mailed to subscribing libraries at regular intervals. In that era, when personal computers were still relatively new, many publishers were not yet licensing full text of their articles, so most publications were represented only by article abstracts. This meant the InfoTrac family of products at their inception were primarily bibliographic databases as opposed to full-text databases. Furthermore, the personal computers typically used as InfoTrac terminals operated only in text mode, meaning that "full text" meant only text and not the article as originally published with photos and illustrations.
However, InfoTrac databases were published in coordination with various microfilm products from IAC which came on sequentially numbered auto-loading cartridges, on which individual frames were also individually numbered. Most InfoTrac abstracts and full-text articles from the 1980s and 1990s have a location code at the end of the article which points to the exact frame on a microfilm cartridge where the story begins, which a library user could use to obtain a copy of the article as originally published. With each microfilm product subscription, IAC included a large rotating carousel with slots in which the cartridges could be stored for easy access, and also sold proprietary microfilm readers for its cartridges. The readers were able to automatically take up the loose end of the microfilm upon cartridge insertion after a second or two, while standard microfilm reels must be manually wound into a reader, which is much slower.
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