RE: batch download was RE: Olivia Judson

["Pikas, Christina K." <Christina.Pikas@jhuapl.edu>]

Someone here informs me that JHU is a special case - that we're a 
beta tester for a new feature - so even if you're at an 
institution with Scopus, YMMV.

With that said, you check the items in your reference list that 
you're interested in and then click on download. You get the 
Quosa Download Manager (which might actually have required a 
download the first time, I forget). You then can specify a pdf 
naming convention (default is: (Article Title)_(Pub Year)_(Jnl 
Title).pdf)

It runs the download and lets you know the status.

Quosa is a stand-alone product to search and manage mostly biomed 
literature.  It supports a little analysis.  It's a subscription 
item and because of its biomed focus, we wouldn't have it if it 
weren't for that little part of our institution in East 
Baltimore.

BTW - I am in no way advocating the purchase of Quosa or similar, 
but thought it was relevant to the conversation.

With that said, Mendeley is another service that does some of 
what you're looking for.  Yes, wouldn't it be nice if there were 
complete metadata available for all of the references I want to 
deal with!

Christina K. Pikas, MLS
R.E. Gibson Library & Information Center
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Voice  240.228.4812 (Washington), 443.778.4812 (Baltimore)


-----Original Message-----
From: richards1000@comcast.net [mailto:richards1000@comcast.net]
Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2009 4:15 AM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Cc: Pikas, Christina K.
Subject: RE: batch download was RE: Olivia Judson

Ms. Pikas:

Some listmembers don't have access to ScienceDirect or Scopus. 
Would you please describe how Quosa works?  What does the user 
see, and what choices of metadata are presented to the user?

I ask because I think this issue is complicated.  Multiple 
metadata elements are associated with each journal article (such 
as authors (who are sometimes numerous), title, journal title, 
date, volume/issue number, abstract, topical keywords describing 
the article's content, both the general topic and subtopics, and 
URL or digital object identifier).  Many users use citation 
organization software (such as ProCite or RefWorks) to organize 
all of their documents, but some don't, and may encounter the 
difficulties that Dr. Judson describes.  One user may wish to 
index an article by certain metadata elements (say, lead author 
and date), while another author may wish to use different 
metadata elements (say, article title or journal title and topic 
or date).  In fact, the same user may wish to use different types 
of metadata elements to index different articles pertaining to 
the same research project, or to index the same article for 
different research projects.

What's more, metadata for digital documents is presented in 
different ways.  Many digital documents have embedded metadata 
that conforms to international standards (such as Dublin Core) 
and that can interact with citation organization software, but 
many digital documents do not--e.g., an image-only PDF file may 
contain only human-readable metadata, which a user will have to 
index manually.  Moreover, some versions of citation organization 
software can automatically extract embedded metadata from a 
digital document, but some versions can't, in which case another 
piece of software must mediate between the document and the 
citation organization software to enable the user to obtain the 
metadata in an efficient manner.  If the citation organization 
software doesn't include it, that extra mediation software must 
be provided by the user or the publisher.

Citation organization software obviates the filename problem, and 
enables indexing and retrieval using multiple metadata elements, 
but it's labor intensive to use if the publisher doesn't offer 
the metadata embedded in the document, or if the citation 
organization software doesn't automatically pull metadata from 
the digital document and the user does not have (and the 
publisher has not provided) extra mediation software.

What would be ideal is if every digital document had complete, 
embedded metadata conforming to international standards, and if 
every academic user had easy-to-use citation organization 
software that contained mediation software that would 
automatically extract metadata from every digital document, as 
soon as downloaded by the user.  But I think we're not there yet. 
And until we are, many users of digital documents will be faced 
with a time-consuming and confusing indexing task, about which we 
can reasonably expect them to complain.

Robert Richards