As an offshoot of our discovery (Find it at Lincoln), authentication, and library website projects, we’re trying to impose a little bit more order on the various lists of electronic resources we present to users – aiming at a single version of the truth.
For historical reasons, users can browse several different lists of e-resources at Lincoln:
- The ‘e-Library‘ page on the University Portal
- A list of packages on the e-journals A-to-Z
- Resources available through the MyAthens portal
- Other (minor) authentication systems, each listing its own subset of resources
Frustratingly for our users (and for slightly obsessive-compulsive librarians like myself), no one of these lists exactly corresponds with any other. Each one includes a slightly different set of resources. For example, looking at a Venn diagram of resources listed on two platforms only – the e-Library and electronic journals A-to-Z:
- The e-Library contains 163 distinct resources (usually referred to as “databases”). 106* of them also appear on the e-journals A-to-Z: but there are 57, mostly non-bibliographic, resources on the e-Library which aren’t on the A-to-Z. I kind of expected this.
- Conversely, the A-to-Z contains 162 packages (including a number of titles which don’t form part of a package). 112* of these are reflected on the e-Library, but there are 50 A-to-Z packages which aren’t on the Portal. This was less expected, and is more worrying!
- The name given to a resource on one platform doesn’t necessarily correspond to the name given to the same resource on the other platform.
- We use a Google Spreadsheet to [try and] keep tabs on this mess.
- *The reason why only 106 resources on the e-Library correspond to 112 packages on the A-to-Z is that one “database” can be represented by a number of packages. For example: the Portal lists “JSTOR” as a single resource, whereas the A-to-Z lists three separate packages: JSTOR Arts & Sciences I, …Arts & Sciences II, and …III.
Drop in the other two platforms which list e-resources, and the Venn diagram will look something more like this:
Rationalising these various lists has to be a way toward better e-resources management, and we need to get to a stage where we present only one version of the truth at our users. As part of the ‘Find it at Lincoln‘ project, we’ll be re-populating the A-to-Z knowledgebase from scratch, reviewing our acquisitions/ERM procedures along the way. And for our new website, we’re looking for better ways of presenting lists of resources than the current e-Library page on the Portal.
Side note: it’s possible to use the MS Excel =Match function to compare two lists of resource names that nearly, but don’t exactly, correspond. Formula is:
- =MATCH(“*”&LEFT(<value in native list>,12)&”*”,<foreign list array>,0)
Absolutely agree Paul. We’ve got exactly the same problem. Lists of stuff in the catalogue, in SFX, in the discovery system and our list of selected resources on the website. And the names in the back-end systems aren’t always the same. It’s a big piece of the work that Owen (@beersoft) is doing to normalise stuff so we can start to show people one view of the resources. Ideally with a single search box that pulls in everything. Be interested to hear how you get on.