Support : Publications : Chronolog Archives : July/August 2004

Managing Your Dialog Profound and Dialog NewsRoom Account with My Dialog

A new feature of the enhanced Dialog Profound and Dialog NewsRoom interface is the account management option—My Dialog. With the tools in My Dialog, you can access account information easily, track usage throughout an organization with subaccounts, create customized billing reports, customize search options and manage your documents.

Figure 1

View Figure 2

Located in the upper right corner of the screen (Figure 1 on the right), the My Dialog link contains five options, including Session Summary, Dialog BillBack, Subaccount Manager, Preferences and My Documents (Figure 2). In the following case study, we look at how Company X uses these varied features to manage its global account.

Company X is a multinational company with offices worldwide. Researchers in many of these offices are tasked with compiling intelligence on their competition, tracking new products and generally keeping up to date on other competing companies. The corporate librarian is in charge of compiling reports and tracking the costs of online research. Some examples below illustrate how My Dialog helps all researchers in the organization.

Session Summary

A Session Summary displays at the end of each search session for the subaccount in use. In Company X, subaccounts have been set up for searchers at different locations to track online search costs. At the end of each search session, the researcher clicks the Session Summary link in My Dialog to see the costs incurred for that session. Although these summaries are estimates, they allow searchers to keep tabs on their online costs.

Dialog BillBack

Dialog BillBack is an electronic reporting tool that enables the administrator, in this example the corporate librarian, to manage the organization's online research billing strategy. By clicking the Dialog BillBack link in My Dialog, the administrator logs on with an authorized user ID and password through a secure Web site and obtains customized reports for their account. See the March-April Chronolog article "Hassle-Free Chargebacks: Introducing Dialog BillBack™" for more on Dialog BillBack.

User Preferences

View Figure 3

Different types of preferences can be set: search, Alerts, general, and document costs and display (Figure 3). You can set preferences to remove duplicate records automatically, limit the scope of text to fulltext or a table of contents, set the language in which to display titles and much more. Company X, for example, has subsidiaries located in Spain and France. These sites chose to display the titles list in Spanish and French in Dialog NewsRoom.

View Figure 3a

To monitor costs, searchers also set preferences so that the cost for sections of a table of contents in a market research report always displays. Another preference used by Company X is the Alerts preference, which automatically removes duplicate records and sets a default e-mail address for Alerts delivery (Figure 3a).

Manage Subaccounts

View Figure 4

After signing on to Dialog Profound and entering a subaccount, the subaccount name displays in the upper right corner. Company X has many subaccounts to track usage throughout the organization. Each site manager is responsible for creating new subaccounts for its location and editing its current subaccounts like this one for the "sales dept." (Figure 4)

My Documents

View Figure 5

My Dialog makes it easy to manage documents in the My Documents window. You can create or delete folders that reside in the left pane and view, move or delete documents in the right pane just by clicking the appropriate button. Users at Company X each have their own personal folders on the My Documents page, as well as folders for their Alerts (Figure 5).

No matter how large or small your organization, My Dialog tools can help you manage your account easily and more efficiently. If you haven't used it yet, give it a try.

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