Posts Tagged ‘e-journals’

New links to e-journals (replacing SwetsWise)

Posted on March 28th, 2013 by Paul Stainthorp

The electronic journals A-to-Z has been updated this week, with new links for more than 970 journal titles on the websites of their respective publishers.

These e-journals used to be accessible through the SwetsWise platform. This platform has now been switched off, and the University of Lincoln no longer has access to e-journals via SwetsWise.

Instead, the same e-journals can now be accessed on familiar “native” publisher platforms such as:

…plus a host of smaller, single-title publishers’ websites.

We know that SwetsWise has been a familiar platform for e-journals that some people will miss(!) – and while it does/did provide some consistency of access to journals across multiple publishers, there are a number of advantages to moving toward using the native publisher link for all titles, including:

  1. Reduced platform costs for the Library;
  2. Improved E-Resources Management (ERM) procedures for keeping e-journals up to date;
  3. A better idea of exactly which titles we have access to from which publishers;
  4. Academic staff tend to value the “native” publisher platform over aggregator platforms like SwetsWise;
  5. Publisher platforms provide access to valued Early Publication content and extra features.

Inevitably with such a large change to so many e-journals at once, there will be the odd problem title which comes to light. If you spot any errors, inconsistencies, or problems with accessing e-journal content at the University of Lincoln, please report it.

New content on the e-journals A-to-Z

Posted on October 10th, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

A few things that have been added/updated recently on the Electronic Journals A-to-Z. New and updated full-text holdings should shortly be reflected in Find it at Lincoln.

Brand-new e-journal packages and titles:

Holdings updated:

Authentication changes:

Notes:

[1] I’ve not been able to find (by searching through Cambridge’s “Account Administrator” pages) a holdings file for our Cambridge University Press subscriptions—at least, not in a format that we are able to use in the A-to-Z—so the 40-odd titles in this package have been checked individually against the Cambridge Journals website. For that reason, I can’t guarantee that they are 100% accurate.

[2] The ScienceDirect Freedom Collection package in the A-to-Z knowledgebase does not have any holdings defined – libraries have to add their own custom holdings dates. I added ours this by ordering an “Electronic Holdings Report” from Elsevier’s admin tool, then downloading the A-to-Z holdings and using an Excel =LOOKUP() formula to match against ISSNs common to both spreadsheets. This is very fiddly and unfortunately will have to be re-done at intervals.
Screenshot from Elsevier

[3] Created using SwetsWise’s “Download Publication List” feature, re-formatted for the A-to-Z. Again, this has to be re-done at intervals as our Swets subscriptions change.
Screenshot from SwetsWise

[4] Links to HeinOnline journals/articles will now automatically log the user in via OpenAthens (federated access). However there are a couple of residual problems with these links: some of the OpenURL data for an individual article is not being passed through correctly (leading to the occasional error), and also the authentication does not work properly in non-Microsoft browsers – e.g. Chrome, Firefox. For the time being (while HeinOnline technical support address the issue) there is a note on the A-to-Z advising people to use Internet Explorer if they can. This is obviously not ideal.
Screenshot from the A-to-Z

EZproxy bookmarklet-powered stable journal URL hacking for fun and profit

Posted on September 26th, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

Here’s an idea I stole from technologist Phil Wolstenholme. See his website for a clearer explanation: http://wolstenhol.me/ezproxy/

It’s a bookmarklet which can be used to re-write stable/persistent journal URLs so that they’re passed through the University of Lincoln’s library proxy authentication service (EZproxy). You can then use the re-written links in Blackboard, reading lists, web pages, etc., with the confidence that University of Lincoln students will be able to access the resource, on- or off-campus, using their University login details.

First you’ll need to drag the below link up to your browser’s bookmark/links bar…

Drag the above link to your bookmark bar
Screenshot of the bookmarklet

…then visit a journal/article/e-resource on the open web, and click the bookmarklet button. At this point one of two things will happen.

1. Either:

If you use the bookmarklet on one of the e-resources that we have set up to use with EZproxy, it will re-write the URL to go via a University login. Examples:

If you’re not already logged in, when you proxify the URL (and when your users subsequently try to access the resource), you’ll see the standard University of Lincoln secure sign-in page.
Screenshot of the secure sign-in page

You can now copy-and-paste the rewritten URL and add it as a link in Blackboard or a reading list.

2. Or:

If you try and use the bookmarklet with a journal/resource that doesn’t work with EZproxy (i.e. one that isn’t on this list)—either because we just don’t have access to it at Lincoln, or because it’s not currently set up to work off EZproxy/IP authentication—then you’ll probably see the following error:

To allow http://www.foobar.com/ to be used in a starting point URL, your EZproxy administrator must first authorize the hostname of this URL in the config.txt file.

Within this database’s section of config.txt, either the following line must be added:

Host www.foobar.com

or, alternatively, a RedirectSafe for this host or domain may be appropriate.

After editing config.txt, the EZproxy server must be restarted to make changes take effect.

If that happens to you, please tell me about it.

As an aside, I’d really like to see this functionality added to lncn.eu, our home-grown URL shortener. That is, if a user tried to minify a resource URL from a ‘whitelist’ of domains derived from the EZproxy /config.txt file, lncn.eu would respond with not one, but two shortened URLs, one of which would have been rewritten to go via EZproxy.

Cambridge Uni Press on the e-journals A-to-Z

Posted on August 22nd, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

41 electronic journals from Cambridge University Press/Cambridge Journals Online are now available though the A-to-Z website.

Here’s a list of the titles:

  1. Ageing and Society (eissn:1469-1779)
  2. American Political Science Review (eissn:1537-5943)
  3. arq: Architectural Research Quarterly (eissn:1474-0516)
  4. Behavioral and Brain Sciences (eissn:1469-1825)
  5. Breast Cancer Online (eissn:1470-9031)
  6. British Journal of Nutrition (eissn:1475-2662)
  7. British Journal of Political Science (eissn:1469-2112)
  8. Cambridge Law Journal (eissn:1469-2139)
  9. Central European History (eissn:1569-1616)
  10. Comparative Exercise Physiology (CUP) (eissn:1755-2559)
  11. Contemporary European History (eissn:1469-2171)
  12. English Profile Journal (eissn:2041-5362)
  13. English Today (eissn:1474-0567)
  14. Equine and Comparative Exercise Physiology (eissn:1479-070X)
  15. Historical Journal (eissn:1469-5103)
  16. International Labor and Working Class History (eissn:1471-6445)
  17. International Review of Social History (eissn:1469-512X)
  18. Journal of Agricultural Science (eissn:1469-5146)
  19. Journal of American Studies (eissn:1469-5154)
  20. Journal of Child Language (eissn:1469-7602)
  21. Journal of Dairy Research (eissn:1469-7629)
  22. Journal of Economic History (eissn:1471-6372)
  23. Journal of Functional Programming (eissn:1469-7653)
  24. Journal of Public Policy (eissn:1469-7815)
  25. Journal of social policy (eissn:1469-7823)
  26. Language in Society (eissn:1469-8013)
  27. Microscopy and microanalysis (eissn:1435-8115)
  28. New Theatre Quarterly (eissn:1474-0613)
  29. Organised Sound (eissn:1469-8153)
  30. Perspectives on Politics (eissn:1541-0986)
  31. Proceedings Section A: Mathematics – Royal Society of Edinburgh (eissn:1473-7124)
  32. PS: Political Science & Politics (eissn:1537-5935)
  33. Psychological Medicine Monograph Supplement (eissn:0264-1801)
  34. Review of International Studies (eissn:1469-9044)
  35. Rural History (eissn:1474-0656)
  36. Social Policy and Society (eissn:1475-3073)
  37. The China Quarterly (eissn:1468-2648)
  38. Theatre Research International (eissn:1474-0672)
  39. Theatre Survey (eissn:1475-4533)
  40. Urban History (eissn:1469-8706)
  41. World Politics (eissn:1086-3338)

The journals are hosted on the Cambridge Journals Online platform. To access them from the A-to-Z, you’ll need to log in using your University of Lincoln Blackboard login details.

Screenshot of the Blackboard login page

More packages on the e-journals A-to-Z

Posted on July 27th, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

Update on the project to re-populate the A-to-Z database, which lists all of the Library’s available e-journal content. The site now includes the following additional packages (in addition to those added in previous updates):

  • Autism Data (A&I)
  • Bibliography of British and Irish History (A&I)
  • BioMed Central (Open Access)
  • Brand Republic
  • Brill Journal Archive Online – Full Collection
  • British Periodicals Collection I (UK)
  • British Periodicals Collection II (UK)
  • Cochrane Library (Wiley)
  • Creative Club
  • DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals
  • EBSCO Open Access Journals
  • Engineer-it
  • Free Medical Journals
  • HeinOnline English Reports
  • HeinOnline Law Journal Library
  • Index to Theses (A&I)
  • Leisure Recreation and Tourism Abstracts (A&I)
  • Mintel Oxygen Academic
  • Other
  • Periodicals Archive Online – JISC Collections Selection
  • Social Care Online
  • Specify-it Building
  • SpringerOpen
  • Taylor & Francis Geography, Planning, Urban and Environment Archive (JISC Collections)
  • Television and Radio Index for Learning and Teaching (TRILT)(A&I)
  • The Construction Information Service (CIS)
  • The Occupational Health & Safety Information Service (OHSIS)
  • TVTiP : TVTimes Project 1955-1985
  • UK PubMed Central
  • Web of Knowledge (A&I)
  • Zetoc (A&I)

The full list of providers is here. The A-to-Z now provides access to more than 89,800 unique e-journal, etc., titles (comparable with the number of titles available before we began the project). And our information about the contents of each package should be much more accurate. We still have more to add, but we’re getting there!

More packages added back into the A-to-Z

Posted on July 10th, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

The project to re-populate the e-journals A-to-Z is picking up pace: the database now contains content from the following providers/databases in addition to those we added last week:

  • 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers
  • 19th Century British Library Newspapers
  • ACS Legacy Archives
  • Arts & Humanities Citation Index (ISI)(A&I)
  • BIOSIS Citation Index (A&I)
  • BIOSIS Previews (ISI)(A&I)
  • British and Irish Women’s Letters and Diaries Pre (1500-1950)
  • Cambridge Companions to Literature and Classics
  • Conference Proceedings Citation Index- Science (CPCI-S) (A&I)
  • Conference Proceedings Citation Index- Social Science & Humanities (CPCI-SSH) (A&I)
  • Datamonitor 360
  • FAME (Financial Analysis Made Easy)
  • Global Market Information Database
  • House of Commons Parliamentary Papers
  • Journal Citation Reports
  • JSTOR Arts & Sciences I Archive Collection (U. K. Server)
  • JSTOR Arts & Sciences II Archive Collection (U. K. Server)
  • JSTOR Arts & Sciences III Archive Collection (U. K. Server)
  • Lawtel
  • Literature Online UK : LION
  • Market Research Abstracts (A&I)
  • MEDLINE (ISI)(A&I)
  • Other
  • Oxford Art Online
  • Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
  • Oxford English Dictionary
  • Oxford Reports on International Law
  • Royal Society of Chemistry Journals Archive
  • Science Citation Index (A&I)
  • Social Sciences Citation Index (ISI)(A&I)
  • SwetsWise Fulltext Titles
  • The Times Digital Archive
  • Web of Science
  • Westlaw UK
Full list of providers is here. There are now 74,400 unique e-journal titles available through the A-to-Z.

E-journals A-to-Z ‘low water mark’

Posted on July 2nd, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

As threatened, we’ve now stripped all content off the e-journals A-to-Z ready for re-population.

All that remains on the site is a small number of titles (10) which are managed for us by EBSCO acting as a subscriptions agent, and which appear on the A-to-Z automatically.

Screenshot of an empty A-to-Z

These remaining 10 “low water mark” titles are:

  • Digital arts
  • English Today
  • HerbalGram
  • Journal of sociolinguistics
  • Language in Society
  • New Theatre Quarterly
  • Performance Research
  • Theatre Research International
  • Theatre Survey
  • World Englishes

Disruption to the e-journals A-to-Z – in a good cause

Posted on July 2nd, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

We are about to start work on re-building the e-journals A-to-Z website at the University of Lincoln.

As part of the Find it at Lincoln project, we are re-populating the A-to-Z with the most up-to-date information about our electronic journal holdings, and making sure that the Library has better processes for keeping it up to date in future.

This process will involve ‘wiping the slate clean’ before quickly repopulating the A-to-Z with as much accurate information about the University’s full-text journal holdings as possible.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused while this website re-building work is going on.

Access to e-journals and databases via the Portal e-Library page will be unaffected.

Please contact the Library if you have any questions or are unable to access the e-journal you need while this work is going on.

Java, John and JournalTOCs

Posted on April 17th, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

I heard recently that the ticTOCs journal tables-of-contents service will close down in the next month or so. ticTOCs was a JISC-funded project which hasn’t been developed for several years now.

Screenshot of ticTOCs

It’s effectively been superseded by the JournalTOCs service, “the largest, free collection of scholarly Tables of Contents (TOCs)”. The outgoing service has published some advice for users on transferring saved lists of TOCs between ticTOCs and JournalTOCs.

ticTOCs did have one particularly useful feature: a text file of all the TOCs it contained (at http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/text.php), which I’ve been filtering and using since 2009 to create a custom package of RSS feeds for upload to the e-journals A-to-Z at Lincoln.

While JournalTOCs doesn’t provide the same simple text list feature, it does have a fully-documented API. This is much more powerful and flexible for developers, but it’s not quite so straightforward as /text.php to create my list (a subset of all the feeds in JournalTOCs, matching only those journals to which the University has full-text access) using desktop tools and no programming.

A chance comment from a colleague at another university about Lincoln having “developers coming out of its ears“(!) inspired me to ask on the LNCD development group for help.

Dr John Murray of the Lincoln School of Computer Science responded, and very kindly supplied a Java program which I can use to identify which journals in our A-to-Z are represented in JournalTOCs, and so build a list of links to valid RSS feeds. Starting with a comma-separated list of ISSNs (which I downloaded from the A-to-Z), the program takes each ISSN in turn and makes a call to the JournalTOCs journals API. Depending on the data returned by JournalTOCs, the program records each ISSN as ‘VALID’ or ‘INVALID’ (i.e. no RSS feed available) in a new .csv file.

Thank you very much, John!

[Aside: to use John's code I had to learn how to compile and run Java programs on my laptop (running Ubuntu 11.10). For the record—and because I imagine it'll be useful again in the future—I first had to install OpenJDK 6 by going to the terminal and running the command:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk

…then, once OpenJDK had installed, using the following command to select the correct version of Java:

sudo update-alternatives --config java

…before compiling and running the program itself.]

Once all the ISSNs had been checked against the API and the validated list constructed (this took ~5hrs to run!), I used Microsoft Excel to filter out only the ‘VALID’ ISSNs matched in JournalTOCs, and used Excel’s =LOOKUP() function to pull in enough information about each journal from our managed title list (previously downloaded), to create a custom upload text file.

Screenshot of the A-to-Z

The updated package of journal article RSS feeds is now available to view on the A-to-Z. We’ll review and re-generate this every few months, as we do with all custom and publisher-generated e-journal packages. At the time of writing, it contains just over 10,000 journal article RSS feeds, each one corresponding to one of our full-text journals. I’ve also added an orange RSS icon and link to JournalTOCs for each one, using the A-to-Z’s public notes feature.

So: which other library APIs will accept an ISSN as an input, and what other custom packages could I create using John Murray’s code in the same way?

E-resource URL hacking for fun and profit: how to build direct, reliable login links to journals

Posted on March 9th, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about electronic resources which make it difficult or impossible to create reliable deep-ish links to a particular bit of the resource from Library websites (usually our library catalogue or EBSCO’s e-journals A-to-Z/link resolver) – links which handle the authentication properly and take the user to the place they wanted to go in the first place, and which do so consistently.

Below is an example of the kind of process we go through to construct direct, reliable login links to the home pages of journals, when authentication is via Athens and/or the UK Access Management Federation (UKAMF). The process uses a facility the A-to-Z has to rewrite URLs according to a set of predictable rules, generating a new login link which is a function of the original URL.

N.B. it’s only possible to do this at all if the Athens/UKAMF authentication point for the journal has a predictable structure. If a login URL includes any randomly-generated or unknown elements which vary from journal to journal, then it can’t be generated by predictable rules. If the login URL can’t be expressed as a predictable function of the basic URL for the journal, then we won’t able to create a direct, reliable login link for the resource. Some providers rule themselves out at the first hurdle because of this, and it’s intensely irritating for me and even more so for users.

This whole process should get easier (and the end result less frustrating for users) when we introduce EZproxy as an additional authentication tool, but even so I would say that the ability to analyse, deconstruct, rewrite and generally hack URLs is one of the most important skills needed by anyone who works with e-resources.

Here’s how to build a direct, reliable login link via Athens/UKAMF. Bear in mind that the example given is one of the easy ones!

  1. The A-to-Z knowledgebase stores the basic resource URL; usually a link to the journal home page. In the kind of pseudo-markup tags used by the A-to-Z to rewrite URLs, this is identified as {URL}.
    • For example, the {URL} of the e- journal Food Science and Technology International is:
      • http://fst.sagepub.com/
  2. First we visit the journal home page at {URL} and hunt around until we track down a reliable Athens or WAYFless UK Federation login URL. Often we look at other libraries’ web pages and/or UKAMF guidelines for inspiration.
  3. Determine whether the login URL is indeed a predictable function of {URL}. If it isn’t; you might as well stop at this point!
    • E.g. (this one goes via Athens, and is predictable):
      • http://auth.athensams.net/?ath_dspid=SAGE&ath_returl=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.sagepub.com%2Flogin%3Furi%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Ffst.sagepub.com%252F
  4. Often {URL} will need to be %-encoded one or more times (roughly; one level of encoding for each level of URL ‘nesting’: each time a parameter within the URL is itself another URL). Encoding can be expressed in the A-to-Z using the paired tags {startencode} and {endencode}. Now rewrite the login URL using A-to-Z markup tags:
    • E.g. (note the double encoding!):
      • http://auth.athensams.net/?ath_dspid=SAGE&ath_returl=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.sagepub.com%2Flogin%3Furi%3D{startencode}{startencode}{URL}{endencode}{endencode}
    • Or (equally valid):
      • http://auth.athensams.net/?ath_dspid=SAGE&ath_returl={startencode}http://online.sagepub.com/login?uri={startencode}{URL}{endencode}{endencode}
  5. Then, encode the whole login URL one more time, and prefix the whole thing with the standard Athens cookie-setting URL. This ensures that users are sent to the University of Lincoln ‘alternative login’ point, rather than the old-fashioned Athens username and password form.
    • Either:
      • http://auth.athensams.net/setorg.php?id=LINCUNI&ath_returl={startencode}http://auth.athensams.net/?ath_dspid=SAGE&ath_returl={startencode}http://online.sagepub.com/login?uri={startencode}{URL}{endencode}{endencode}{endencode}
    • Or:
      • http://auth.athensams.net/setorg.php?id=LINCUNI&ath_returl=http%3A%2F%2Fauth.athensams.net%2F%3Fath_dspid%3DSAGE%26ath_returl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fonline.sagepub.com%252Flogin%253Furi%253D{startencode}{startencode}{startencode}{URL}{endencode}{endencode}{endencode}

It may look awful, but it works! (Usually.) It would be very useful if there were a place for A-to-Z customers to share (via a wiki, maybe) URL rewriting tips and examples. Some other useful links: