ACRL/NEC Serials Librarian Interest Group

Many Pieces: One Puzzle:
Providing Access to Electronic Journals
March 16, 2007 –
Simmons College Conference Center

Program Summary

Patricia Hatch

Abstract:

Presents a summary report of the Association of College and Research Libraries New England Chapter’s Serials Interest Group’s Spring 2007 program, which dealt with the relationships between link resolver companies, publishers and librarians to provide access to electronic journal information and full-text articles. This author’s summary report focuses on the key points made by each of the speakers in their presentations.

65 technical services librarians from around the New England area gathered at the Simmons College Conference Center in  Boston Massachusetts for the ACRL New England Chapter Serials Interest Group’s Spring 2007 Program, which presented a panel of distinguished speakers who discussed the relationships between link resolver companies, publishers and librarians to provide patrons with access to full-text electronic journal articles.  Daphne Harrington, Director of the Simmons College Library, welcomed the participants and guests to the forum. Patricia A. Hatch, Sr. Library Analyst/Training Specialist at the Harvard University Library Office of Information Systems, then introduced the panel and gave the opening remarks.

Speakers:

Nettie Lagace, SFX Product Manager, Ex Libris Ltd.
Ronna Archbold, Sales Manager North America, TDNet Inc.
Jozef Paulik, Senior Manager Product Technology, ScienceDirect Gateways and Linking, License Content, Elsevier
Amira Aaron, Director for Information Resources, Brandeis University Library and Technology Services

We all want to provide our users with the best resources, with easy access to those journals.  How do you decide which service works best for you?  How do companies providing link resolver services work with publishers to gain access to their materials?  How do publishers work with these companies?  And how do these companies, publishers and librarians keep track of it all in this fast-paced, always-changing environment?  This program will feature presentations from key players in the field.

Nettie Lagace

Nettie began her presentation with a basic overview of what link resolvers do.  There are many types of resources that can be a source for an OpenURL: A&I databases, E-journals, OPACS, E-print archives (OAI), Electronic theses and dissertations, Local digital repositories.  These OpenURLs can then link to targets such as E-journals, OPACs, ILL/DocDel, Citation/A&I dbs, Patent databases, Encyclopedias, Copyright Clearance, Search engines or other places on the web that you choose.  The link resolver asks three questions before it returns a result to a user: Do we have access to the title? If yes, from which provider?  Does our subscription include coverage of this particular issue?  If all the questions can be answered affirmatively, then the link resolver can return the information to the user.  Nettie also discussed Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) that can be very useful in pinpointing a particular article in a particular journal.  But unfortunately even some DOIs can be bad. 

OpenURL issues  also sometimes become Target issues: Quality often dependent on Source provider’s underlying data.  Sometimes original metadata recognized by Target, sometimes not.  At the minimum: Year, volume, issue, start page is needed, but sometimes you also need article title and author names – ERIC document numbers, dissertation identifiers, etc.  

Nettie then identified publisher sources of data, which included FTP, Web title lists, and Excel files via provider, even receive some by hand.  Good provider relationships improve this process immensely.  What link resolver companies need to know include the general interpretation of data layout, how frequently will data be updated, exceptional cases – what’s best advice, can you link to this stuff ?, and journal-level, TOC-level, article level syntaxes all needed, DOI handy too.  Finally, will the link-to syntax change?

Nettie also discussed some data issues: frequency of data changes from providers, matching incoming data with existing data (if different providers), embargoes, which are often dependent on incoming data, and title changes – how is old title reflected on provider site? And in data feeds?

Nettie explained that this is an ongoing, iterative process.  She provided a link to a United Kingdom Serials Group study that will be presented at the ACRL Charleston Conference in March 2007.  The details can be found at: http://www.uksg.org/resolvers.asp.  The study focuses on how different sites presented publisher data.  Is it “big”, meaning that the publisher will get a lot of exposure for their content?

Nettie then provided libraries with some ideas for what they can do, including: let your vendors know that their OpenURLs, their data, their Target URLs matter to helping their products show as “big”. Be a matchmaker – introduce your publisher contacts/source database contacts to your link resolver contacts.  Offer to serve as a tester or reviewer, or advisor.  Provide examples to your provider support – both OpenURL as sent to the link resolver and target URL sent to destination (as far as you can tell).  Nettie provided the following URL from the California Digital Library as an example of how a library is providing leadership on how Open URLs should be formatted for their system: http://www.cdlib.org/vendors/#technical.  Nettie then thanked the audience for their attention.

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Ronna Archbold

Ronna Archbold's Powerpoint presentation

Ronna provided a small overview of TDNet and proceeded with an overview of the arrangements made between TDNet and publishers/vendors to gain access to services.  She stated that building and maintaining an accurate “Master” Knowledgebase is TDNet’s main priority.  Detailed data is required, including titles, ISSNs, online coverage, provider collection names, full text status, title and article-level URLs (DOI, OpenURL and proprietary formats) and more.  The data is integrated from multiple sources (publishers, vendors, table of contents suppliers, CrossRef, etc.) and bibliographic reference tools are also used for data verification. 

She then spoke about how TDNet keeps this updated, and provided several avenues, including: direct relationships with the provider, which is the preferred method for maintaining accurate information on the provider’s titles, collections, coverage, and links.  TDNet and provider agree on data content, format, delivery method (FTP, e-mail, etc.), and delivery frequency.  The benefits for TDNet are that it allows TDNet to provide best available information on content, coverage and links.  The benefits for provider are increased visibility to users while decreasing support incidents caused by out of date links.  If no relationship exists, the information is captured from provider websites or holdings information supplied by the library.  The provider information supplemented with other linking data, such as CrossRef DOIs, PubMed IDs (PMID) and TDNet Tables of Contents collection integrated into TDNet Knowledgebase

The benefits to this approach for TDNet libraries include a comprehensive and global master Knowledgebase that allows for the creation of a custom knowledgebase for each library, automatic weekly updates to provide the most up-to-date information on the library’s holdings (Real-Time updates also supported), and increased awareness and usage of library resources (usage tracking tools provided).  The benefits to this approach for the provider includes increased awareness and usage of content and more bang for the buck – effectively providing access to many libraries and users through a simple data feed

Some of the technical challenges faced in implementing TDNet technology with content include providers that are technically unable to supply data feeds; data completeness, including the ability to make sure that there is enough information about individual titles vs. complete databases/collections/packages, coverage, embargos and backfiles and linking standards and capabilities.  Other challenges present themselves with the content “jumps ship”: journal titles change publishers (i.e. select Cambridge University Press titles now published by Oxford University Press), publishers change vendors (i.e. Taylor & Francis titles formerly available on MetaPress now accessed via InformaWorld).  Still other challenges are presented when a journal name changes, managing end user expectations, and provider linking options.  Specifically cited about the latter: does the provide support title-level, article-level links?  Does the provide support linking standard such as Open URL, DOI, etc.?  Does the provider require library-specific identification codes or syntax in order for the links to work for a specific library?

Ronna concluded here remarks by providing some resources that libraries can peruse, including links to crossref (http://www.crossref.com), the US National Information Standards Organization (http://www.niso.org/index.html), and is also willing to sit down personally with libraries to discuss these issues further (e.g., at lunch).  Librarians can contact Ronna at ronna@tdnet.teldan.com.

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Jozef Paulik

Jozef began his presentation with a discussion about confusion that many libraries had between the College edition of Science Direct and Science Direct itself.  Many libraries had subscriptions to journals supplied by both and using the Elsevier interface, the user would have to choose what service to use to get to the desired journal content.  Libraries were not happy with the fact that users needed to make a choice instead of just bringing the user to the desired source.  Jozef discussed some of the options—one is that the College edition is no longer available, and the second is a database interface that libraries could use to declare the preferred source for providing patron access to resources.  He was interested in obtaining library feedback to the use of the interface.

Jozef also discussed standards and the need for these to better deliver resources.  He showed examples of the Elsevier standard and noted some of the problems they’ve encountered when using the standard, for example, when  a supplement to an existing journal that may have similar page numbering to the basic bibliographic unit, this made it difficult to provide an appropriate link to link resolver groups.  Elsevier has worked with the link resolver companies to enable the link resolver service to work with these issues.  The relationship between the publisher and the link resolver companies is a positive one to successfully work through these types of data issues in order to provide users with the resources they need.

The question and answer part of this session proved to be the most interesting.  Many librarians present noted that the user should not have to select a preferred service for article delivery—many of the users have no idea or interest in what services the library actually subscribes to, they just need to get to the information.  Librarians also noted that standards need to be set in order to provide timely access without loss of service as soon as a user tries to link to a journal article.  Nettie Lagace noted that a single standard is not nearly as important as the opportunity to work with the publisher to understand their linking syntax and be able to develop an “on the fly” solution to any linking problem.

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Amira Aaron

Amira’s full powerpoint presentation is available at the ACRL/NEC Serials Librarian Group’s website.  The presentation is very comprehensive and most librarians will find it extremely useful when considering link resolver companies, working with publishers, and the many decisions libraries have to make concerning this burgeoning technology.

Amira’s provided an overview of her presentation: Managing e-resources today – emphasis on access; link resolvers – benefits, selection, implementation, maintenance; troubleshooting & support; Statistics & collection development; financial & staffing concerns; and looking forward – improving access.

Managing e-resources: Amira noted that the amount of time it takes to manage e-resources can be overwhelming, and displayed the Yale website as an example of this (http://www.library.yale.edu/ecollections/eresmanage.html).  She noted that this is a difficult time of transition as libraries are dealing with both print and electronic workflows.  We are still retraining staff concerning how to work with these resources, developing new skills and workflows.  Libraries will need to focus emphasis on what’s important – let some of the old ways of doing things go.  Amira pointed out the important goal of updating only one database – need it to be stable and up to date – not there yet.  She pointed out that ERM’s (Electronic Resource Management systems) have some promise – not there yet.  Libraries also need better tools to make discovery and access easier for the user – link resolvers, federated searching, LibX, etc.

Link Resolvers: benefits, selection implementation, troubleshooting and support:  Link resolvers allows users to link directly to full text & holdings from external databases; recognizes institutional access rights; solves “appropriate copy” problem; allows for institutional/library branding; brings back some of the serendipity of browsing; allows library staff to be creative in selecting and presenting links; and links are dynamic and up to date.  Patrons are the big winners – research time has been significantly reduced. 

Amira also discussed the impact of link resolvers on library staff, including the fact that it solves general problem of linking and resulting maintenance – reduces troubleshooting, the knowledgebase is maintained by vendor – significant reduction of staff time (e.g. aggregator database holdings); it handles authentication such as EZProxy; it generates A-Z lists & MARC records; it supports unmediated document delivery and ILL services;  its Citation Linkers are used by reserves staff; it provides links to Copyright Clearance Center for technical services staff to obtain copyright permissions; and it provides linking to vendor databases.

Impact on Collection Development: Significantly improves and increases use of electronic resources; Statistics & reports are collection development tools, for example: most used journals with no. of hits, most used sources & targets, and report of full text requested and not found.  Consortial uses – e.g. acquisitions vendor databases – out to virtual catalog.  Also: if no SFX buttons, not as heavily used…if not an SFX target, not as heavily used…

Amira provided several slides on the selection of link resolvers, emphasizing that libraries should speak to colleagues as well as to the companies.  Her presentation provided many points on general selection consideration, content considerations, functionality, and integration and related products.  She then discussed the implementation of these services; the kinds of decisions that need to be made, the many tasks involved in implementation, the ongoing maintenance needs, the ability to provide MARC record services, pointing out that while this allows for maintenance in only one database, this also creates utter dependence on the link resolver vendor.

Amira's presentation also includes information about citation linkers/article finders, e-resource troubleshooting, support for e-resources, including off-hours vendor support for e-resources, licensing & license breaches, the multitude of statistics provided by these services, e-resource evaluation & “weeding”.  Other slides cover managing e-resources  mentioning other tasks & concerns including Collection development (who's doing it-the library or the vendor?) renewals and  licenses, e-journal package renewals, swaps, etc., transfers of journals between publishers, embargoes and moving walls – e.g. JSTOR, how to provide perpetual access, and electronic journal archiving – Portico, etc.

She emphasized that Content is Critical--Users want & need the content immediately. It's not sufficient to load content, updates and fixes on a regular basis – sometimes months.  If something is broken – whoever’s responsibility it is – it needs to be fixed ASAP!  We all need to agree on a priority list for top resources which should be covered off-hours. Libraries need to be able to add new titles (with ISSN’s), update thresholds, URL’s immediately – perhaps adopting a CONSER model.  Ideally, we need a universal knowledgebase ala OCLC.

Link resolvers are one of the most powerful, practical and exciting pieces of technology introduced in the scholarly information community.  Link resolvers have increasing impact on both library patrons and staff--maintaining the link resolver is time-intensive for both vendor and library – she suggested that this maintenance evolve into more of a shared task among libraries and vendors.  We need full participation of vendors and providers to participate and follow standards!  Future initiatives such as Shibboleth – simplifying management of identity and access - will increase effectiveness of the technology

Amira concluded her remarks about providing the best access – looking forward, mentioning some ideas including a one-stop shop – search, link, access to institutional repositories and local digitized collections as well; powerful searching made easy and placed where the user is; better integration of e-journals and databases – all electronic resources – as well as print; federated searching vs. harvesting; trying to figure out how do patrons use this information once they find it; saving, tagging, sharing, Reworks, etc.; Tic’s and alerts – vendors need to work together; promoting e-resources & training – go where users are; when can we eliminate print workflows? How to achieve up to date content with total shared responsibility; and true 24/7 support – what will that mean?

Many of the participants suggested that Amira's presentation could serve as a basis for a future program, as the presentation confronts many questions that librarians are asking about these new technologies.

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Conclusion

Patty Hatch thanked the participants for their presentations.  Librarians who attended the program were pleased with the speakers and their program offerings and many felt they had a better understanding of how link resolvers work and how publishers provide access electronic journal content.  They also had accolades on the important library decisions presented by Amira Aaron.  This is another area where those who deal with serials will have to stay on top of new developments. 

The planning committee members for this ACRL New England Chapter Serials Interest Group Program were: Joanne Doucette, Co-Chair, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences,  Patricia A. Hatch, Co-Chair, Harvard University Library Office for Information Systems; and Anne Meringolo, Simmons College Library.

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