EBSCO Publishing is pleased to announce that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has lvicensed the Novelist™ fiction readers' advisory service and the Professional Development Collection™ database for the ACCESS PENNSYLVANIA Database project.

Starting in September, these databases will be available to all libraries in Pennsylvania that participate in ACCESS PENNSYLVANIA, which encompasses 2,700 school, public, academic and special libraries throughout the commonwealth; and directly to participants in Pennsylvania's POWER Library service.

Novelist, which includes data on more than 100,000 fiction titles, 75,000 full text reviews, and 36,000 subject headings, will be linked to the ACCESS PENNSYLVANIA Database. This will allow library users to see immediately which libraries in the system own a book described in Novelist or link from a book listing in the ACCESS PENNSYLVANIA Database directly to descriptions and reviews in Novelist.

The Professional Development Collection provides full text for over 500 high-quality education journals, making it the most comprehensive database of its kind in the world, and an invaluable resource for educational professionals in Pennsylvania.

Gary D. Wolfe, State Librarian of Pennsylvania, said, "Providing Novelist and the Professional Development Collection is consistent with the purpose of the ACCESS PENNSYLVANIA Database, which is to facilitate resource sharing among all types of libraries and particularly to increase the resources available to students and educators. With Novelist linked to the fiction titles in the ACCESS PENNSYLVANIA Database, users will easily be able to find library locations for the titles they want."

About ACCESS PENNSYLVANIA
The ACCESS PENNSYLVANIA Database, managed by the Health Sciences Libraries Consortium in Philadelphia, is a coordinated effort to automate library services throughout the commonwealth. Taking advantage of this investment in library resources, the ACCESS PENNSYLVANIA Database provides easy access for library patrons to materials in collections across the state.

A project of the Pennsylvania Department of Education and the Office of the Commonwealth Libraries, ACCESS PENNSYLVANIA began in 1985 with a vision of providing a union catalog across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. It was the first and remains the largest statewide union catalog for all types of libraries. When libraries join the database, they must sign an agreement to share their resources statewide. As of Summer 2002, ACCESS PENNSYLVANIA's shared union catalogue offered patrons over 39 million holdings, approximately 5.7 million unique records and included 98% of Pennsylvania's school districts.

Released: Sept. 24, 2002