NATIONAL CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFERENCE SERVICE DOCUMENT DATABASE

User Guide

The National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS) Document Database on CD-ROM contains bibliographic data for more than 125,000 items. Most date between 1972 and 1993, some are older. Bibliographic citations, index terms, abstracts, and NCJ numbers are included for all documents. The documents may be ordered from NCJRS.


1. Ask for the CD-ROM at the Reference Kiosk.

2. The software to run it is loaded on the Government Documents Computer Workstation. Insert the CD-ROM into the d-drive.

3. At the C:> type NCJRS <enter>.

4. Wait for the title page to appear. Press any key.

5. The search screen will appear. Use the arrow keys to move the highlight bar to the field you wish to search:

	"Subject Global Search" searches all fields except Pages, Journal Citation, Sponsor, Sales, and Corporate Author. Boolean, proximity, truncation, and comparative searches are supported. See help screens <F1> for more detail.

	"Thesaurus Terms" searches Main and Index Terms. These terms are derived from the National Criminal Justice Thesaurus.

	 "Personal Author" searches just the author field. Type the desired author's name "last name" comma "first initial" period "middle initial" period. examples: Aaron, B. Brammer, D.B.  "Abstract" search just the abstract for the specified term or phrase.

	Other searchable fields are "Title", "Journal Citation", "Corporate Author", "Publication Year", "Pages", and "NCJ Number".

Ways of searching:
	a. Type your search term(s) in the highlighted blank, or
	b. Press <F2> Browse to see a list of indexed terms. Choose "Word" to see a list of individual words, or "Entries" to see complete entry from a line index. Use the arrow keys, PgUp, and PgDn to move highlighted bar to the desired word or phrase. Type the initial letter of the word to jump to the approximate location in the index. Press enter to select the highlighted word or phrase.
	c. You may search more than one field at a time. For example, you may want all the works by a particular author in a specific year. Thus you could type the author's name in the author field, and the last two digits of the year in the publication year field.

Press enter to begin the search.

6. The system will search for the term(s), and give a prompt indicating the number of matching records. Press <F3> to see brief descriptions of the first two matching records.

7. Press PgDn to see additional records (one new record at a time).

8. To see the bibliographic data for the highlighted record, press <enter>. (This is a toggle key, press <enter> again to return to the list.)

9. To print a record:
	a. Bring the desired record to the screen.
	b. Press <F4> Actions.
	c. Move the highlight to print one <enter>.

10. To save a record to a disk:
	a. Bring the desired record to the screen.
	b. Press <F4> Actions.
	c. Move highlight to Export <enter>.
	d. Move highlight to File name, type a:xxx <enter>. Note: xxx equals your filename.

11. At any level, press <F1> for help. Printouts of some of the help screens are in the documentation notebook.

12. To exit the database, Press <F10>. At the C:> type menu <enter>.

Prepared by Sherry Engle, Mankato State University, 2/95