RE: Cataloguing open access

[David Goodman <dgoodman@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>]

Approaches such as yours can reduce the workload and produce excellent
ejournal lists, but the problem I have with this general strategy is that
it causes patrons to ignore the non-electronic resources. I have often
encountered users who thought that the ejournal list was the total journal
holdings of the library.

Admittedly in some fields essentially all the current and back journals
will be available online. However, this is not yet true of most subjects
even for journals, and it will be a long time until it is even roughly
true for other material.

Thus I think we need an integrated solution. The difficulty here is that
the catalog has traditionally not been a very effective mechanism for
ordinary users in identifying journals. It works well for serial
catalogers, which is as expected as they designed it for their own use. I
think other librarians can be expected to learn how to use it adequately,
as we use other tools designed by specialists without apparent concern for
those outside. For ordinary users, coping with title changes in any
available system is not practical--hence the widespread use of locally
prepared lists in all science libraries and other areas where journals are
the main resource.

The practical temporary solution here is the various systems of reference
linking, such as SerialSolutions, LinkFinder, and SFX. These can even add
sufficient information to a catalog display to make it understandable. In
my opinion I think we would do best to use these as steps towards the
admittedly difficult goal of producing a usable single catalog for all the
library resources.

 J�rgensen Lotte wrote:

> Here in Lund we have early on decided not to include the electronic
> journals in our OPAC basically because of the potential workload. We are
> subscribing to many of the big packages where there as you all know are
> numerous changes every year and our budget doesn't allow us to increase
> the staff. What we needed was a system that was as automated and flexible
> as possible so we looked around and found nothing! So we created a system
> ourselves. We call it ELIN@Lund (Electronic Library Information
> Navigator).
>
> >From the beginning we wanted a system that could handle all online
> accessible journals independent of where the access was from, Open Access,
> directly from the publisher, aggregated databases etc. and we wanted to
> include the open archives as well. Another requirement was that the
> article level should be searchable not only journal level. It should be
> possible for end users to create alerts for searches and table of
> contents. And we think we have succeeded. Currently 10 academic
> institutions are using the system sharing the workload but with individual
> setups allowing local branding and local holding information choosing our
> own collection etc. Some libraries are adding all journal titles
> regardless of medium some are linking from their ELIN@ to their OPAC where
> they have the information for the paper version. Flexibility is the
> keyword and the library controls all changes through an administration
> tool. The end users can list all journal titles based on subject, they can
> browse alphabetically or they can search for a journal title. If the end
> user wants articles the UI allows them to broad or limited searches as
> they please.  We don't have much external information on the system yet we
> didn't prioritise that but we have a bit here:
> http://pluto.lub.lu.se/about/one.html