Kerry Bouchard

1
E-Journal List to OpenURL Resolver

• Kerry Bouchard
• Asst. University Librarian for Automated Systems
• Mary Couts Burnett Library
• Texas Christian University

2
Floundering Epoch (pre-1998)

• Publishers begin sending our Serials librarian
  this publication is now available online at
  notices. Serials has to be involved in setting up
  titles.
• Systems cobbles together a URL-rewriting proxy
  program to provide off-campus access to databases
  and e-journals (replaced by Ezproxy in 2000) --
  Systems needs to be involved in setting up
  titles.
• Introduction of web-based online catalog makes
  linking to online journals from bib records
  possible -- Cataloging needs to be involved in
  setting up titles.
• We begin subscribing to services like JSTOR and
  Project Muse. More titles pile up.
• Our serials librarian, Janet Douglass, founds the
  E-Team to coordinate policies and procedures
  for tracking e-journals.

3
Hunter-Gatherer Era (1998-2001)
The E-Team begins tracking subscription
e-journals.

• Relational database of titles built. We record
• URL for the journal main contents
  (volumes/issues) pages
• A local PURL.
• Authentication method. With databases there is
  some variation, but 98 of our e-journals use IP
  recognition. Off-campus users are routed through
  proxy.
• Subject assignments. Initially assigned
  automatically based on call number. Quickly saw
  need to assign multiple headings to titles, so
  added a subject table.
• At the end of the E-Team assembly line, cataloger
  adds the PURL to the bib record (i.e., our bib
  record URLs are PURLs pointing to the local
  relational database.)

4
Hunter-Gatherer Era (1998-2001)
Example PURL

• http//lib.tcu.edu/PURL/ejournal.asp?JSTOR0003003
  1

• Script for processing all e-journal links

• Vendor identifier script uses this to look up
  data on proxy method required for off-campus
  access, and to record a click count for the
  source in our usage log table

• Journal identifier (usually ISSN)

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Hunter-Gatherer Era (1998-2001)
E-Team does not attempt to track

• Dates of coverage for each source
• Free publications, except a handful specifically
  requested by faculty.
• The thousands of full-text titles hidden inside
  full text databases like Academic Search Premier.

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Subject category screen
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Sample Title List
No dates of coverage, just general notes
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Vocabulary Break
You say aggregator
I say fulltext database
Is OCLC ECO an aggregation or a database?

• Maybe all we really care about are the
  differences between

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Users Perspective Browsing
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versus Searching
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Staff Perspective Do we get all titles from this
source?

• Examples
• Citation databases that contain full text for
  some / all journals cited (Expanded Academic
  Index, Academic Search Premier, etc.)
• License agreements for everything available from
  a collection like Project Muse

Or Only a Selection of Titles?

• Examples
• E-journal collections like OCLC ECO, Highwire
  Press JSTOR IEEE journals, etc. Doesnt really
  matter if all the titles in the collection are
  from the same publisher, since we dont
  necessarily subscribe to everything from a given
  publisher either.

12
Agriculture Invented Fulltext Journal Locator
v1.0
Our then computer services librarian James Lutz
downloads lists of journal holdings from various
fulltext databases and sets up SQL union query
to merges all these lists together with the
collections tracked by the E-Team
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Agriculture Invented Fulltext Journal Locator
v1.0
Downloaded Links(take user to database search
screen)
Links to E-Team Records(take user to list of
available volumes/issues)
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Fulltext Journal Locator v1.0

• Vendor journal lists are inconsistent
  different vendors supply different info, in
  different formats.
• Some citation databases list every journal they
  cite -- many links turn out not to be full
  text.
• Our local E-Team list doesnt have dates of
  coverage these links look odd next to the
  vendor records that do have dates
• Finally concluded that it was too much work to
  keep the lists up to date.

15
Agribusiness We pay someone to harvest e-journal
info for us.

• Summer of 2001 we begin subscribing to
  SerialsSolutions journal tracking system. Every
  two months they send an updated list of our
  e-journal holdings from all our sources. This
• Eliminates the need to manually download
  holdings lists from all our fulltext database
  vendors everything is now in one file. Locator
  data can now be relied on to be accurate.
• Gives us dates of coverage for all the
  collections tracked by the E-Team
• Fall 2002 we add a MARC record feed to our S.S.
  contract.
• Means that we have MARC records with URLs for
  about 25,000 titles (35,000 links) that were not
  tracked by the E-Team.

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Now our old list is obsolete and incomplete

• At this point we have around 25,000 e-journal
  titles in our catalog and our Fulltext Journal
  Locator, versus the 2,000 titles entered with
  subject headings by the E-Team.
• E-Team replaces the alphabetical-by-title and
  subject lists of e-journals pages on the library
  web site with pages telling users to search the
  catalog or fulltext journal locator, since these
  lists are much more complete.

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But people really liked the old lists

• Several faculty and graduate students strongly
  object to having these lists removed. They dont
  feel that searching the online catalog is an
  adequate substitute for being able to browse the
  titles in their field.
• LC subject headings dont always work well for
  browsing -- no consistent mapping of specific to
  broad headings.
• If our online catalog software had the
  capability to retrieve all titles in a range of
  call numbers, that would partly address the
  problem.
• There would still be the problem that we want to
  assign more than one broad subject category to a
  single title in many cases, and thats not
  possible if the subject assignments are derived
  from call numbers.

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So we put the lists back

• The E-Team reinstates the title and subject
  lists on the web site, with modifications to the
  underlying relational database so that
• We can differentiate sources that allow browsing
  by volume and issue from sources that take users
  to a search screen. Only sources that allow
  browsing by volume and issue (the same ones
  previously tracked by the E-Team) are displayed
  on the title and subject lists.

Data from SerialsSolutions
Our local list of browsable sources. SSName
field links to S.S. Provider field.
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So we put the lists back

• We can continue assigning non-LC subject
  categories to titles, so that departments can
  browse their lists. (Subject categories are
  linked to ISSN numbers, so once we assign a
  subject heading to one source of the title,
  additional sources of the same journal
  automatically get mapped to the same headings.)

Subject codes (Geology, etc.)
Links codes to ISSNs
ISSNs link to SerialsSolutions Records
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Title list, with dates of coverage
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Fulltext Journal Locator v2.0
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Fulltext Journal Locator v2.0
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Citation databases begin offering linking
capabilities.
Some are explicitly OpenURL based, and others
are not. Either way it is possible to make
journal-level linking work by simply modifying
the Fulltext Journal Locator script so that it
can search by ISSN as well as by words in the
title. (Script will search by two ISSNs print
and electronic if the citation links provide
them.) Not all the journals in the S.S. data have
ISSNs at however.
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Citation with OpenURL like link
URL for the link above http//lib.tcu.edu/PURL/O
penURL.asp?genrejournalISSN0009-2541DT2003061
5TICarbon20isotope20exchange20rate20of20DIC
20in20karst20groundwater2EJNChemical20Geolo
gyVI197IP1-4AUGonfiantini2C20Robertospage
319 (example from Academic Search Premier)
ISSN is all we need for journal-level link
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Front end OpenURL resolver
At this point we provide separate links for the
catalog and locator, because MARC records arent
yet available for all the titles in the locator.
When that changes, a separate full text journal
locator will no longer be needed, for journal
level linking.
Link to search Fulltext Journal Locator Link to
search online catalog
http//libnt4.lib.tcu.edu/PURL/JournalLocator.asp
issn passed in hidden form field
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OpenURL Resolver Result Screen
URL in link abovehttp//lib.tcu.edu/PURL/ejourna
l.asp?ScienceDirecthttp//www.sciencedirect.com/w
eb-editions/journal/00092541
Used to retrieve local info about TCUs
ScienceDirect subscription
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Article Level Linking
The OpenURL provided by Academic Search Premier
in the previous example contained all the
information needed for building an article-level
link
http//lib.tcu.edu/PURL/OpenURL.asp?genrejournal
ISSN0009-2541DT20030615TICarbon20isotope20e
xchange20rate20of20DIC20in20karst20groundwat
er2EJNChemical20GeologyVI197IP1-4AUGonfi
antini2C20Robertospage319 ISSN tells us
its a journal and which one DT date the
article was published, in YYYYMMDD format TI
title of the article (may or may not be needed,
depending on how the target system builds
article-level links) VI volume IP issue AU
author (required by some target systems)
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Article Level Linking

• Two enhancements to the Fulltext Journal Locator
  / OpenURL Resolver script are required to make
  article-level linking work
• A date normalization routine, so that we can
  compare the date an article was published to
  dates of coverage for each potential source of
  the article
• A function to convert meta-data in OpenURL
  format to a format that can be used to create an
  article-level link for a given source. Each
  vendor may require its own function (example to
  follow).

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Date normalization
Dates supplied in the OpenURL links are already
normalized (in YYYYMMDD format). However, dates
we get in our S.S. data feed appear in a variety
of ways
Winter 2002 12/17/1998 1 month ago as in, 2001
to 1 month ago blank a blank End Date field
means to present 1999 no month supplied
Fortunately, there are only a small number of
variations like this, so it was not too difficult
to write a date normalization routine that
converts the SerialsSolutions supplied starting
and ending dates for a publication to YYYYMMDD
format these can then be compared to the date of
publication supplied in an OpenURL to see if we
have full text for the issue in which the article
was published.
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Example metadata parser - JSTOR
The JSTOR web site contains documentation for
building article-level links to JSTOR content
using SICI codes. To construct a SICI, we take
the OpenURL metadata elements we ignored earlier
and convert them into a SICI. So the OpenURL
data genrejournalISSN0002-9475DT19950901TI
Ancient20anagrams2EJNAmerican20Journal20of
20PhilologyVI116IP3AUCameron2C20Alanspag
e477 Becomes sici00022D94752819950901291163
A33C4773A3E22E02ECO3B22D23origintcu
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Example metadata parser - JSTOR
And the user sees
Article-level link using SICI
Journal-level link using old method
Project Muse also supports article-level linking,
but in this case the date parser saw that Muse
would not have full text for an article published
in 1995.
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Article-level linking issues

• Journal source must not only support some kind
  of article-level linking, they need to use links
  that can be derived from metadata. For example,
  an accession numbering system (e.g.,
  http//www.somevendor.com/journals/articles/23090
  238762.html) wont work.
• Would be difficult use MARC records for building
  article level links
• Much more difficult to extract and normalize
  dates as theyre presented in the MARC 856 fields
  (MARC fixed date fields cant be used, theyre
  the date range for the publication itself, not
  the dates of coverage for a particular source)

• Scripting tools (PHP, ASP, Perl, etc) make it
  much easier to pull data from a relational
  database table than from a MARC record (at least
  with our current ILS software).

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Modern era? (Agribusiness crushes the small
farmer)
At least two vendors we work with have announced
article-level linking solutions that may
eliminate the need for local work on this.
So the Systems Librarian has to shift back from
writing cool metadata parsers to attending
committee meetings.
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But maybe theres still some work before we send
the farmer off to the knackers

• Link from the OpenURL resolver to our
  Interlibrary Loan system when we dont have
  access to online or print.
• Still a need to track some titles and sources
  locally and integrate these into the hitlists for
  the OpenURL resolver, since there are still some
  sources that arent tracked by our e-journal info
  vendor.
• Need to keep up with fulltext database vendors
  as they add journal-level/article-level linking
  capability, so that we can change our URLs to
  take advantage of that instead of sending users
  to a search screen.

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In Conclusion
If you have a list of your e-journals in a
relational database Either with data you entered
yourself Or data you get from a vendor tracking
your holdings for you And if the info on each
e-journal includes an ISSN And if someone on
your staff knows how to write web server scripts
that retrieve info from the e-journal
database Then you can turn your e-journal list
into an OpenURL resolver with about 20 minutes
work. (Journal level links article-level
linking takes longer.)
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Kerry Bouchard Asst. University Librarian for
Automated Systems Mary Couts Burnett
Library Texas Christian University Email
k.bouchard_at_tcu.edu This presentation
onlinehttp//lib.tcu.edu/staff/bouchard/OpenURL/
Amigos2003.htm