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Report on the Informal Focused Discussion: "Managing Electronic Serials"
by Frances Schlesinger, University of Massachusetts Boston |
| October 5, 2001 |
Serials Management at the University of Massachusetts Lowell
Presented by:
Pat Noreau
Head of Technical Services,
University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA
Patricia Noreau believes that she has taken the "easy way out" by choosing to use Serials Solutions to track her electronic journals rather than creating her own system.
UMass Lowell's chancellor wants the university to have a strong electronic library. Consequently, the library subscribes to 300 databases and has about 18,000 full text journals. To begin to keep track of these e-journals, she developed an Access database for UMass Lowell's Proquest titles. It was a large and flexible database, which had to keep up with frequent journal title changes and dates of coverage. The reference department also wanted a list of the libraries' online titles. At a conference she attended, she heard about Serials Solutions. Serials Solutions provides a library with a comprehensive list of an institution's full-text, electronic format journals. Because of lack of time and staff, she decided to turn to Serials Solutions. She has had the product up and running since last June. Every two months the list of journals gets updated; this update includes journal URLs and dates of coverage. Both she and the reference department have been very happy with th! e results.
To get started, a library needs to let Serials Solutions know to which databases it subscribes. Pat simply emailed the list. Serials Solutions emailed her back an Excel spreadsheet. In addition to the online journals available through an aggregator, you also let Serials Solutions know about individual e-journal titles. These may be accessible through such services as Ebsco Online or Science Direct. You receive an alphabetical list of your e- journals in HTML. This list will include the various sources through which you can access the journal and the dates of coverage. If the journal appears in an aggregator such as Lexis/Nexis, you link to the database rather than the journal title. UMass Lowell is in the process of adding the e-journals into its OPAC and has the e-journal's URL in the 856 field. Her ultimate goal is to have all the e-journals listed in the OPAC. Because of the Serials Solutions online e-journals database, she no longer prints a list of all the electr! onic journals. To update the list, she emails Serials Solutions new titles; she does not need to edit the list. The cost to subscribe to Serials Solutions is based on the number of databases and individual titles to which a library subscribes. Pat feels it is a great product.
Comments from the general discussion:
In the discussion following her presentation, two other vendors were mentioned: JournalList, which Brandeis uses, and TDNET. JournalList offers subject searching and lets the library update the holdings itself.
The UMass Lowell Libraries cancelled their print subscriptions to Elsevier titles and now only subscribe to them online. Pat has entered these titles into the OPAC, starting with the titles that already have a bibliographic record. It is harder for the librarian to maintain just one record for a journal title, because it must be done manually. However, it is easier for the patron to understand these records.
Pat feels that the user wants information fast. She sees the need for both an easily accessible list of online journal titles and their inclusion in the catalog.
She does not need to edit the Serials Solutions list; she just emails the company UMass Lowell's new titles. In fact, now this updating can be done online.
You can view the UMass Lowell e-journals at: http://library.uml.edu/home/build13.htm
Managing Electronic Serials for NOBLE (North of Boston Library Exchange)
Presented by:
Elizabeth Thomsen
Member Services Manager,
NOBLE: North of Boston Library Exchange
NOBLE maintains a database of all the journals for its twenty-seven libraries. Originally it was for "real things." Now all the items are not physical but electronic. These electronic journals may be purchased by the libraries as individual titles or as part of a database put together by an aggregator. These e-journals come from many different sources. Elizabeth Thomsen believes that all these journals should appear in the library catalog. This raises both philosophical and practical issues. She gave an example of the issues that arise if only print journals were listed in the NOBLE catalog. Salem State has many print journals that other NOBLE libraries do not have, but these journals could be at another library in electronic format. If the e-journals are not listed in the catalog, then a user might not realize that the journal is also available in other libraries as well. She also wants the e-journals listed in a ! catalog for collection management issues, for planning purposes, and for departmental requests. If only the print holdings are in the catalog, then you need to go other places to get the complete information. It would be nice to have the complete holdings in one place. NOBLE does include e-journals in its III catalog. If all the records were in the NOBLE system, the individual libraries could download their records. If they were in a catalog, a user could click on a journal title and go to the journal.
Ebsco is the easiest vendor for NOBLE to work with, because NOBLE is an Ebsco customer. Elizabeth downloads the MARC records created by Ebsco into the NOBLE catalog. It works in batch mode. The holdings information comes from EBSCO as well. The records indicate the start date of the EBSCO subscription. EBSCO also puts in the print ISSN record. NOBLE now has many duplicate records, because she downloads information from various databases. She can add the name of the database, for example, Business Source Premier, as a series title. If there are e-journals from several sources, each one is listed. Ebsco provides a formatted link. When you click on it, it validates the user by IP address. If the user is not validated by IP, he/she can enter his/her barcode. Elizabeth pointed out, that you could not tell where a patron is coming from.
Comments from the general discussion:
At the Consortium level, NOBLE has an Electronic Resources Working Group, which helps her to evaluate what they can actually do. She is not a fundamentalist when it comes to the catalog; she has a public service orientation. However, she recognizes that as a manager, when you deviate from a standard you have a maintenance problem. She believes that the current batch processing is not the way to go. It may be good for the computers, but not for the libraries. She has talked to both EBSCO and III. III has developed an XML harvester (spider), which can look for new records and bump them back to the catalog in MARC record format. Elizabeth is committed to doing more with Ebsco.
The NOBLE libraries get their subscriptions through many different entities. Elizabeth is now working on the Infotrac databases. She has entered all the NetLibrary titles into the catalog.
She runs a centralized catalog for public libraries and some college libraries, so the catalog is really one of NOBLE's key responsibilities. In the NOBLE catalog, a user can start at the local level, such as Salem State, and can also go to the larger NOBLE scope. She noted that NOBLE has 9 or 10 FTE, whereas HELIN, the Higher Education Library Information Network of Rhode Island, has only 1 ‡ employees.
She is training librarians at Salem State to access the serials database. If she can develop something that works for Salem State, she will do a variation for Gordon College.
The III Oracle database is a large proprietary database and is very expensive. She believes that one should be able to embed scripts into the record.
You can view the NOBLE catalog at: http://innopac.noblenet.org/search~/
Electronic Serials Management at Salve Regina University
Presented by:
Olga Verbeek
Information Systems Librarian,
Salve Regina University, Newport, RI
Olga Verbeek described how she went about setting up a database, which includes all of Salve Regina's serials, not just the e-journals. She downloaded the serials information into an Excel spreadsheet and put that information into HTML. She then became interested in Cold Fusion. She noted that the library did not have to pay for the Cold Fusion software because Salve Regina has a license for it. Cold Fusion is a programming environment that allows you to query a database in SQL. She found that she could learn Cold Fusion quickly. Just as with HTML, Cold Fusion uses tags. With Cold Fusion you can query an Access database and so Excel files were transfered into Access files. She also queries into the library catalog. Cold Fusion allows you to maintain a database outside of the library catalog and to build a dynamic web page. She uses the HTML tags to format the pages.
She explained that the actual programming of the database did not take that long. It does include a mixture of programming languages. However, maintaining the database takes work and she updates it as time permits. The database is an alphabetical listing by letter. You can search the database by journal name, by subject area, and by browsing the alphabetical listing. The subjects are based on the majors at Salve Regina. She does have an intermediary page for online materials with access restrictions. For example, Ebsco Online has a permanent URL for a journal and links directly to the journal. On-campus users link directly to the journal, but because of licensing issues off-campus users need to go through the "front door" of Ebsco. She made the database appear in a separate window, so that users can get back to the Salve Regina page. She pointed out that some aggregators such as Proquest do not allow you to directly c! onnect to the journal. You need to search the database for the journal. Both Proquest and Ebsco databases change frequently but you can download their holdings at any time. Updating the database with new records is time consuming and is done at most twice a year. She updates the Project Muse and Jstor information on a per need basis. When she downloads the titles she gets the journal holdings as well. Both Jstor and Ebscohost have moving walls. She has created a simple equation to accommodate the five-year and three-year moving walls. The printed version of serials lists gets produced once a year.
Each entry in the alphabetical list of titles includes when applicable: the call number for the journal; its location; the library holdings, if it's in paper; if it's online, a link to access the journal or the database in which it is aggregated; and e-journal access restrictions. The database does not include the holdings for journals in databases such as Lexis-Nexis.
Olga has created a separate directory for the library staff. This directory is designed to aid staff find electronic journals in the Salve Regina journal database. It is grouped by publisher and gives the journal's URL, which is not available in the public view; gives access restrictions; and indicates whether a journal is also available in print.
Comments from the general discussion:
Olga has gathered all the information about print journals from the catalog.
For e-journals the list includes all publishers and aggregators for a title. For example, if a particular journal can be accessed through Ebsco Online, JSTOR, and Project Muse, all three access points are included in the serials list.
She reviewed the process of putting together the database. She gets the ISSN number for each journal and the moving wall information. She puts this information in a delimited form into an Excel spreadsheet, which can be easily manipulated. Then she imports the database into Access, because you cannot query Excel. She uses Cold Fusion to query the Access database and to put the information on the web. In fact, when you look at the page source, you see HTML, because Cold Fusion turns it into an HTML page. Every journal appears the same. You only need to format it once. Olga pointed out that she wrote an article on Cold Fusion, which can be read in TechCorner on the ACRL NE ITIG website at: http://www.acrlnec.org/sigs/itig/tc_sep_oct2000.htm.
She does have a lot of problems maintaining the database. Her library has a Technical Services Task Force. She hopes that future library ILS systems will include an electronic resources module.
Her library switched from ProQuest to Ebsco because Ebsco provides links using ISSN numbers to online journals and the catalog. She would like catalogers to add more ISSN numbers. ISSN numbers do not have spaces and can be used in a URL. Olga then showed the group the new book list to demonstrate the power of ISBN numbers. For each entry, the new book list has the title of the book, the author, the call number, and the subject headings. By clicking on a title, a person can link to the Salve Regina catalog. The link to the catalog uses none of the information visible in the book list; the link is by the ISBN number. Olga feels that the catalog should be the door to the library, which her serials database and new book list are not.
Salve Regina University has over 4,000 e-journals, 600 without aggregators.
You can view the Salve Regina new book list at: http://inside.salve.edu/mckillop/newbooks.cfm.
Report by:
Frances Schlesinger
Reference Librarian
Healey Library
University of Massachusetts Boston
Boston, MA
Frances.Schlesinger@umb.edu
Comments Welcome!
Attendees: 35
© Copyright 1999-2001, ITIG ACRL/NEC Information Technology Interest Group. All Rights Reserved.
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