Posts Tagged ‘packages’

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

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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!

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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.

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The 80–20 rule and e-journal packages

Posted on July 2nd, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

I predicted, when we were discussing our project to re-populate the e-journals A-to-Z/our link resolver knowledgebase, that we’d be able to get the site back to >80% of its former contents, measured by the number of unique titles listed, within a couple of hours of starting the job.

We managed that OK: the A-to-Z now contains 71,821 unique titles, which is just over four-fifths of the previous high-water mark of 88,000+ titles. N.B. this is no guarantee of quality… the missing 20% certainly contains some important e-journals which still need to be located and added.

We managed this by concentrating on the ‘easy’, Big Deal database packages (the EBSCOhosts, ProQuests, Emeralds, and ScienceDirects), which can be added to the A-to-Z in a couple of clicks – if (and it’s a big if) we have accurate information about the nature of the database subscription to start with. Finding a reliable source for information about our e-resource subscriptions is going to be one of the trickiest bits of this exercise. We carry around a lot of accumulated knowledge in our heads, but we don’t know where we got it from, or how to check it’s still correct!

More importantly, this time we’re writing clear processes as we go, and keeping details of all our packages/databases in a new ERM (E-resources Management) spreadsheet, available to all Acquisitions and E-resources staff on Google Docs.

Here’s the thing –  my hunch is that the missing 20% of unique titles will take significantly longer than a couple of hours to find accurate information for (it can’t be expressed as a single-click Big Deal option, for instance), and even longer to write meaningful documentation that can be picked up by a new member of Library staff and used to help them get to grips with managing the A-to-Z.

80% of the pain from 20% of the content. But that’s why we’re doing this exercise – to get this stuff out in the open and end up with an A-to-Z/link resolver knowledgebase which is a lot more accurate to start with, and which will stay a lot more accurate over time.

If you’re interested, here are the packages we’ve added back on to the A-to-Z so far today. A live list is at: http://atoz.ebsco.com/Providers/1710

  1. Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals (EBSCO Publishing)(A&I)
  2. Academic Search Elite
  3. ACM Digital Library Core Package
  4. AMED (Alternative Medicine)(EBSCO Publishing)(A&I)
  5. Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson)
  6. ASSIA: Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts (CSA) (A&I)
  7. BHI: British Humanities Index (CSA) (A&I)
  8. Business Source Complete
  9. CINAHL with Full Text
  10. Design and Applied Arts Index (CSA) (A&I)
  11. Emerald Management 175
  12. ERIC (CSA)(A&I)
  13. European Views of the Americas: 1493 to 1750
  14. Factiva Academic
  15. Food Science Source
  16. GreenFILE
  17. Humanities International Index (A&I)
  18. IEEE/IET Electronic Library (IEL)
  19. International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (Proquest)(A&I)
  20. International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance with Full Text
  21. Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA)(A&I)
  22. MEDLINE (EBSCO Publishing)(A&I)
  23. MLA Directory of Periodicals (EBSCO Publishing) (A&I)
  24. MLA International Bibliography (EBSCO Publishing)(A&I)
  25. PILOTS Database (A&I)
  26. ProQuest ABI/INFORM Complete
  27. ProQuest Biology Journals
  28. ProQuest British Periodicals
  29. PsycINFO (EBSCO Publishing)(A&I)
  30. Regional Business News
  31. Sage Premier 2010
  32. ScienceDirect Freedom Collection (NESLi2)
  33. SPORTDiscus with Full Text
  34. Teacher Reference Center (A&I)
  35. VDE VERLAG Conference Proceedings

N.B. some of the finer points of authentication haven’t been reinstated yet.

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Rationalising multiple lists of e-resources (ERM)

Posted on June 25th, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

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:

  1. The ‘e-Library‘ page on the University Portal
  2. A list of packages on the e-journals A-to-Z
  3. Resources available through the MyAthens portal
  4. 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:

Screenshot comparing two lists of e-resources

  • 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:

Screenshot of a Venn diagram of e-resource platforms

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)

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Notes on last week’s KB+ meeting

Posted on May 8th, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

As I start to understand the aims of JISC Collections’ KB+ (KnowledgeBase+) project a bit better, it’s starting to seem more and more relevant to the real-life problems of e-resources management. At last week’s meeting of the Technical Advisory Group, here were the things I found particularly interesting:

  • The proposed database model for journal package data, which does a neat job of distinguishing between the various ‘layers’ of ERM (in allowing data to be recorded separately for the issue, title, package and platform involved in a particular subscription deal);
  • The proposed links with the GOKb project in the USA, including the possibility (and it’s only a possibility at present) for sharing/co-designing data import processes; and the aims of the GOKb project itself in building and publishing collaboratively-maintained journal package data openly for the Kuali Open Library Environment;
  • The plans for live user testing of the first KB+ data release later in May, which will include e-resources librarians from 10 institutions getting their hands on the data and initial UI. This seems like a really useful and rare opportunity to do some near-real-world testing with groups of experts in the field of ERM. (N.B. this first group of 10 users doesn’t include the University of Lincoln – but I’ve asked Liam Earney if we could have ‘observer status’!);
  • The interesting questions (raised by Owen Stephens) around the complexities involved in representing overlapping journal package deals to e-resources managers – how will the librarians react to having their assumptions (and their mental model of what a journal ‘deal’ is) … challenged? My gut instinct is that we ought to want to know the underlying detail of multiple access rights in a single journal package – to dispel the ‘myths’ that might have grown up about our holdings over several years, even if it makes things look more complicated than we thought they were. (Naturally we need a way of re-presenting / simplifying this complexity to our users.)

I’ll continue to make notes about KB+ on this blog.

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KB+ TAG meeting

Posted on May 3rd, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

I’m in London today for a meeting of the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) of the JISC KnowledgeBase+ (KB+) project.

KB+ is an ambitious project to create a “shared service knowledge base for UK academic libraries to support the management of e-resources by the UK academic community“. Project leader Liam Earney blogged recently about what KB+ ought to look like on ‘day one’ (1 September 2012). It’s quite an impressive list of features. The KB+ blog is at: knowledgebaseplus.wordpress.com

I’m particularly interested in the project because of the overlap with our own internal Discovery selection & implementation work, as part of which we’re reviewing our serials acquisitions and ERM procedures, looking for simplification and efficiency/automation wherever possible. Liam’s blog post on the possible future impact of KB+ is worth a read here. Sample quote:

“The benefits of focusing on the data is that the Knowledge Base+ service will ‘add value’ to a whole range of other local databases, ERMs, link resolvers and knowlegebases[…]“

I’ve written in the past about the difficulties we have at Lincoln—difficulties which appear to be shared by most academic libraries—in reconciling data provided by publishers/e-journal platform providers with what exists in commercial knowledgebase software (such as Lincoln’s current EBSCO A-to-Z service), and with what we think we should be entitled based on our subscription agreement! So many journal subscription packages are common to lots of libraries, if not standard across the whole of the UK – it seems obvious to centralise this information.

One of the functions of the TAG is to: ”Provide advice and guidance on the technical architecture, infrastructure, software, standards and tools to be adopted and implemented by the project”

As part of that, I’ve been reading up on the KBART (uksg.org/kbart) – Knowledge Bases And Related Tools guidelines, which provide a useful framework for understanding how ERM data should propagate through library systems. Key quote: with ”small adjustments to the format of their title lists, content providers can greatly increase the accessibility of their products”. This is certainly true. We waste a lot of time formatting and re-formatting publisher data to make it fit our knowledgebase.

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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?

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EJS / E-journals from EBSCO being phased out

Posted on March 2nd, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

Just a note that the 11 journal titles which used to form the E-journals from EBSCO (a.k.a. the EBSCOhost Electronic Journals Service or EJS) are no longer listed as a discrete package on the e-journals A-to-Z. The EJS platform is (apparently) no longer being actively developed by EBSCO. The following journals should all still be accessible via the A-to-Z, as part of other publisher and/or database packages:

  1. Digital arts
  2. English Today
  3. HerbalGram
  4. Journal of sociolinguistics
  5. Language in Society
  6. Museum History Journal
  7. New Theatre Quarterly
  8. Performance Research
  9. Theatre Research International
  10. Theatre Survey
  11. World Englishes

The EJS platform has also been removed from the University Portal.

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SpringerLINK journals

Posted on December 21st, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

This blog post is prompted by a couple of recent enquiries about the University of Lincoln’s access to e-journals on the SpringerLINK platform (www.springerlink.com). Basically, we don’t currently have platform-wide access to all articles on SpringerLINK, nor can Lincoln students/staff log in using Athens.

However, we do subscribe to a small number of individual titles from Springer, those being:

  1. Animal Cognition (issn:1435-9448)
  2. Crime, Law and Social Change (issn:0925-4994)
  3. Current Psychology: Research and Reviews (issn:1046-1310)
  4. Distributed Computing (issn:0178-2770)
  5. Environmentalist (issn:0251-1088)
  6. International journal of legal medicine (issn:0937-9827)
  7. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology (issn:0091-0627)
  8. Memory & cognition (issn:0090-502X)
  9. Systemic Practice and Action Research (issn:1094-429X)
  10. Theory and Society (issn:0304-2421)
  11. Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations (issn:0957-8765)

These 11 subscription journals are now listed on the Library’s electronic journals A-to-Z site. Access is not via Athens, but you can log in—whether on or off campus—using your normal University of Lincoln network\accountID and password.

The SpringerLINK platform also provides access to freely-accessible content from about 40 Open-Access journals, under the SpringerOpen initiative. SpringerOpen journals are now also listed on the e-journals A-to-Z. If you need an article from any other Springer journals (not listed above and/or Open Access), you can order a copy using the Library’s inter-library loans service.

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