I call the sum of these innovations the WMU Library 1.9, not that they aren't ready for production release, but because 2.0 has such a ring of finality and certitude, and we intend to keep refining, improving, and as often as necessary, overhauling our collections and services in support of the WMU curriculum and maritime research.
New databases
OECD Transport Library. After getting several reference questions the answers to which required purchases from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's online collections, we decided to subscribe to the OECD iLibray. Actually, we got the subset known as the Transport Library. This includes approximately 500 books, year books, conference papers and individual chapters in the Portable Document Format (PDF), with more content being added each month. This collection can be searched online at the iLibrary web site and PDF's can be downloaded by anyone in the WMU community. The purchase was made in early 2012, and we are about to renew the subscription. To make the OECD content more easy to discover, we recently downloaded the Transport catalog records from the OECD web site, and will be including them in our local catalog, with links directly from the catalog record to the full text.Clarkson's Shipping Intelligence Network. We have had several students and visiting professors asking for various reports and statistical information by Clarkson's, so we were leaning towards a subscription already when we heard from the incoming professor of ship finance and risk management that Clarkson's was essential to his research and to the assignments he would be giving his students. Clarkson's, which charges premium prices for premium information, was very generous in its academic discount, and as a result, our students now have access to a searchable ship registry of over 42,000 existing vessels and nearly 10,600 ships on order, with searchable data on owners, builders, flags, fleets, fixtures, and sales, in addition to market reports on more than 20 sectors, time series and graphs generation, and full text access to Clarkson Shipping Intelligence weekly and monthly reports. If I were planning on being a shipping magnate, I would have an office subscription to this database -- which reminds me: Use of the WMU subscription to Clarkson's is for Academic purposes only. The WMU MSc curriculum provides an education in how to use it, but if you want to make money with it, get your own license.
Guide to Shipping Registers. This database from Marine Money includes details of Flag State requirements for vessel registration, list of IMO Conventions ratified, registration fees, etc. Much of this information used to be provided in print format as the Lloyd's Guide to Ship Registries and Ship Management Services, but frankly, the lack of searchable, sortable, categorized content, does not make this site more useful than a printed version. The interface is just a drill down map of the world that leads to one or more documents about the flag state, often a series of simple pages in Google Sites, but many times a PDF, offering registration information of varying currency in no consistent order. A vessel owner looking to register would have to browse state by state and take notes, just as with a printed book. Still, a maritime library needs to provide its patrons with access to this information, and for the time being, this is the best we've found. With enough participation from our world-wide patronage, however, this is exactly the kind of information that could be crowd-sourced for free, with a much more useful interface. The data hosting costs would be minimal, perhaps sufficiently paid for with clickable web ads, or perhaps even by a small contribution from the flag states themselves. This purchase was made in pursuant to research needs of Prof. Murkejee and PhD student Jian Zhao. The print publications by Lloyd's Ship Management that was on the library shelves was far out of date.
HeinOnline Core International Collection. More than 1,600 law and law-related periodicals from inception; the world's largest collection of constitutions and constitutional documents; One hundred thousand of the most important early English cases that laid the foundation for the laws of nations under the British Empire; The United Nations Law Collection, Foreign & International Law Resources Database, as well as Legal Classics. This new acquisition will be particularly useful to students and professors of Maritime Law and the Law of the Sea. We are grateful to Hein for a very steep discount on our subscription price. Many thanks to Professor Chie Kojima for patiently enduring our failure to get HeinOnline when she first mentioned it nearly two years ago.
Science Direct Deposit Account. The journal titles in Science Direct are expensive, but some of the articles in them are highly desirable to our patrons. We simply could not afford to subscribe to every title that might be of use, but we also did not want WMU library users to miss out on content that is of use. Through the Elseviere/Science Direct deposit account system, the library has prepaid for a bundle of articles. Our users can find articles in any of the Science Direct publications, and submit a request for it through the library. Staff will mediate the order, which will be deducted from the deposit account. This way, library users can search the entire database, but the library only pays for individual articles rather than for yearly journal subscriptions. Although access to the requested material is not immediate, the library staff will in most cases obtain the article on the same day, or at the latest, on the next business day.
Proxy server
As in the case of most of our databases, WMU has a "site license" which enables all our students and faculty simultaneous access based on their location. If they are within the "IP range" of WMU, on the ethernet or wireless, they are automatically allowed into these third party resources. But students who live off campus, or professors on travel, etc., are unable to access these resources that the library has paid for them to use. To address this problem, the library purchased EzProxy, a software service that allows WMU members who are not physically on campus to appear to third parties as if they were coming from within the WMU domain. The links to databases on the WMU web pages are set up to route users through the proxy server. If they are within the university domain, they go straight to the resource. If not, they are asked to authenticate with their WMU Gmail login and password. If they are already logged into their WMU Google Apps account, the proxy service will accept and route them to the desired resource. For sites that require a username and password, EzProxy can be configured by library staff to provide institutional login credentials behind the scenes, so that this information does not need to be shared.
With EzProxy, the library's subscription-based content can be made available to all our users wherever they are, but if the user is not first proven to be a member of WMU, or an on campus visitor, that content can not be accessed. EzProxy is sold by OCLC as subscription software and is hosted on an in-house WMU server.
OpenURL resolver
Leased more for development purposes than for immediate deployment, the 360 Link subscription service by Serials Solutions enables third party systems to retrieve links to electronic articles, books, chapters and conference papers without having to know the actual web address of those items. By encoding reasonably accurate and correctly formatted citation information in the web address (known as the Uniform Resource Locator, or URL), third parties have their requests checked against a knowledge base configured to know what journals, databases and ebook subscriptions a library has access to. Knowledge base companies work with database companies and know which database packages their library customers subscribe to. As a middleware service, 360 Link checks an incoming request against its knowledge base, processing the bibliographic data encoded in the URL and resolving it as a link to the full text document if the requesting party is authorized to view the content. This becomes particularly useful in federated searching across multiple databases maintained by a variety of publishers and information aggregators, or when building a common index of bibliographic data harvested from multiple databases.
Most of the major players in academic publishing have contributed their bibliographic data to one or more knowledge bases already, so that subscribers to a particular knowledge base, typically libraries, need only tell the Resolver which databases they subscribe to in order to provide links to all the journal titles in those databases, and all the full text articles available in those journals. When search results are returned via the Resolver service, if two or more databases contain the requested article, all links will be shown. If one of the databases offers the journal title, but not the particular issue or date of publication being requested, a link to that database will not appear in the search results. If none of the resources return full-text links, a link to the library's catalog can be returned. Libraries typically do not index at the article level, but resolvers can be configured to check to see if the title is available in the print collection, and if the particular issue needed is owned by the library. The resolver can also link to an interlibrary loans or article purchase request form, automatically filling in the bibliographic portion from the search terms in the URL.
With implementation of the Resolver, much of the content residing behind the paywalls of WMU subscriptions can now be directly accessed from Google Scholar. A Scholar user within the WMU IP range or using the WMU proxy server would be known to Google as a WMU patron. Since the library Staff have registered the university's Serial's Solutions 360 Link connecting information with Google Scholar, Google will route search results through WMU's Resolver. As it normally would, Google will return links to documents that match the search criterial, but it will also provide direct links to full text content from any of the information resources that the library has registered with the knowledge base service. Thus, journal articles available through the library's subscriptions to ProQuest, Ebrary, Cambridge, Springer, etc, can be directly accessed from Google Scholar search results.
As with Google Scholar, anything we might buy, lease, or develop, in pursuit of unifying search results from disparate resources, will be reliant on a vast knowledge base of URLs. A community-maintained knowledge base of comparable accuracy and comprehensiveness as those now available commercially is yet to be realized. Free, OpenSource Resolver software that manages and configures these knowledge bases is available, but knowledge base vendors already bundle their own OpenURL Resolver with the purchase. We shall continue to explore options and lobby for a free knowledge base of URL's contributed freely by professionals and academics in the maritime community, but for now, we have access to a very comprehensive repository of links to the content we pay for, which will facilitate user access to that content, from wherever they happened to discover it.
A-Z journal list
Serials Solutions offers an alphabetical list of the electronic journals we have access to through our subscriptions packages with various databases. This list is comprised of approximately twenty thousand titles. Serials Solutions also lists many of the ebook titles we own or lease, which is close to eighty thousand. One never knows in what journal, or in what academic discipline, an article might turn up that will be useful to the maritime researcher, so the WMU library user is free to browse the whole A-Z title list, or search it for journals or book. However, among the scores of thousands of titles available, some will have a higher percentage of relevant content than others. The library has therefore set up a system to routinely search the entire list by key words in title and present a more manageable A-Z list of journals likely to have a higher proportion of maritime-related content. The list is comprised of approximately 150 e-journals. Coverage dates are included, as are links to the journal. Users authenticated with their WMU Google Apps account can browse select a title, browse through the volumes and issues, and access any individual articles that is covered in the library's subscription to that journal. The A-Z list also provides a search form for each journal, allowing users to search for specific articles within the journal. The Full, as well as the Selected, A-Z list of journals can be found on the library home page under the E-journals link.Course readings & electronic reserves
The library has launched a web site to make available articles, book chapters, conference papers and documents that are required reading for WMU classes. Course instructors can specify content they want on "Electronic Reserves," and the library will either track down a digital copy, or scan one from the print collections. Digital reproductions are limited to copyright and the right of fair use for academic purposes. Students can go to the Readings web site, and select the appropriate course link. In some cases, a link is provided to an online resource elsewhere, such as Ebrary, ProQuest, or IMO. In others, a PDF will be provided. For reasons of copyright compliance, not all content is downloadable, and will therefore have to be read online. But it must be borne in mind that this system is less costly than providing individual print copies to each student, and it is far more flexible and more easily updated than the traditional system of ordering print copies, waiting (hoping) for their arrival, receiving and in-processing them, and signing them over to individual students. Thanks to Ms. Anna Volkova of the library staff for her initiative and persistence in making online reserves a reality.
Replacing the "Maritime PDF" database with The Beacon
The library will be replacing the database known as "Maritime PDF" with "The Beacon," a search and retrieval tool built by our own Chris Fitzpatrick. The Beacon's technologies are newer, the interface more user friendly, and the application more scalable and adaptable for our future needs.
That said, the Maritime PDF database was in such horrible shape -- about equal portions of valuable and worthless content mixed together, with no useable "metadata" for author, subjects, publication information, etc. -- that on our first launch the Beacon will contain only the dissertations that we have in electronic format. That is the approximately 400 dissertations that have been stored electronically since 1999 -- out of a total 8 thousand items currently in the Maritime PDF.
We are not throwing away any content from the Maritime PDF collection, but we do not want to add anything to the Beacon that we have not first identified as worthy of storage, and second, that we have not properly cataloged. Proper cataloging allows users to filter, sort and browse in a way that can not be done in a database that only offers keyword searching. It also allows users to export records into bibliographic reference tools such as Endnote, Refworks, Mendelay, etc.
Faculty members who know of specific content in the Maritime PDF that should be retained are advised to let the library know. We will extract it and place it in the queue for cataloging and addition to the Beacon. Meanwhile, the library will shortly begin a scanning project to add the WMU dissertations written prior to 1999 (more than 1200).
The tentative date for taking down the Maritime PDF is 1 Nov 2012. If you would like a sneak peak at the beacon, check out http://beacon.wmu.se
New library web site
The library has been limping along for quite some time using the catalog as its home page. Although not optimized for it, the system which allows searching and circulation of our print inventory has had web pages added to it explaining library policies and opening hours, listing our databases and journal holdings, and posting library news and announcements. But as of 19 October, 2012, we now have a real web site that is more attractive, easier to navigate, and much more easier to update and maintain. It holds the Selected A-Z journal list, provides library news and new book announcements, links directly to our popular online subscription content, and will shortly provide forms for interlibrary loans and purchase requests. But this is just the beginning. We will be making many more additions in the future, so stay tuned. As usual with all things web at WMU, a special thanks to Erik Ponnert for his insights and assistance in getting the site configured and launched.
No comments:
Post a Comment