electronic journal lists

[Fairbrother, Carol]

I have been asked by a colleague to send this message:

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We maintain an intranet web site for e-journals in addition to including
them in our web-based catalogue.
Over the last year we have been working on a project to develop a
Virtual Library for the employees of our parent institution, the
National Research Council Canada.  This was conceived as a web site,
accessible only to Council staff, that would provide access to online
information.  Part of the resources we wanted to offer were the
e-journals for which we were establishing licensed arrangements.
Because we wanted the Virtual Library (VL) to be a centralized point of
access to information, we incorporated lists of the journals as web
pages in it.  In addition we catalogued the records in our Innopac web
catalogue (http://cat.cisti.nrc.ca/screens/mainmenu_eng.html).  We
wanted to emphasize to VL users that we had made special, licensed,
fee-based arrangements to give them access to these titles, and we felt
that having records only in the catalogue wouldn't make this obvious.
We are also cataloguing free e-journals but only in the catalogue, not
in the VL, to keep this distinction.
Our VL pages provide access four different ways:
alphabetically by title, by publisher, by subject, and by keyword
search.  In addition we have a section listing individual electronic
reference tools.  We currently have over 500 titles in the site.
Because this kind of database work is very similar to cataloguing, the
maintenance of the e-journal web pages is handled by staff in
cataloguing.  I coordinate the activity with four people who each do VL
stuff as a small part of their workload.
The lists initially started out as standard HTML-coded pages.  This
meant that every time we added, deleted or changed a title, we had to
repeat the work in three different files - once for the title list, once
for the publisher list, and once for the subject list.  It was a lot of
work and inconsistencies crept in among the three files.  A programmer
in our Internet group developed a methodology whereby all our e-journals
lists are now maintained in an MS-Access database, and asp programming
generates the web pages.  Using the Access database makes maintenance
much simpler, since we only have to do something once and it is
automatically reflected in the three different Web page lists.
We use the Web pages to do link-checking since our Innopac catalogue
does not currently allow us to check links within it.  One person uses
Linkbot (http://tetranetsoftware.com/linkbot-info.htm) once every week
to identify changes in URLs.  I am currently trying out Tierra
Highlights (http://www.tierra.com/products2/highlights2.html) which does
live monitoring of page changes.  We have found that the licensed
e-journals are usually very stable but that the free ones change a lot.
It takes about three hours every week to deal with what the link-checker
finds, plus about the same to do maintenance to add new titles or delete
those we no longer want.
For our situation, feedback from users of the site is extremely positive
and confirms that we made the right decision.  However maintaining
e-journals in catalogue records as well as in a web site does create a
work load that has to be weighed against the usefulness of the web site.
This is a long enough story, but I would be happy to provide more
information to anyone who is interested.
Diana Winninger
Manager, Non-Serials Selection/Cataloguing
Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information
Ottawa, Ontario
diana.winninger at nrc.ca
phone (613) 998-5692
fax (613) 952-8245


----------
	>From:	Elizabeth Felt [SMTP:felt at mail.wsu.edu]
	>Sent:	Wednesday, December 10, 1997 12:33 AM
	>To:	Multiple recipients of list
	>Subject:	electronic journal lists
	>
	>I checked the archives, and although this subject has been
	>briefly discussed before, the questions I have were not really
	>answered, so here we go again....
	>My library is debating whether or not to have a list of
	>electronic journals available from our website. This would
	>include the ones we are subscribing to, as well as high
	>quality, free e-journals. Our library is already putting
	>E-journals into the catalog, and we do have a web version of
	>our catalog; however, some people feel that a comprehensive
	>list of all of our electronic journals would be nice. I know
	>that some libraries are doing this and have very impressive
	>lists (SUNY-Buffalo, for example.)
	>If you have decided to offer such a list:
	>* Who is responsible for adding/deleting/checking the links?
	>* How much time does it involve?
	>* How is the list arranged? By title, by subject, both?
	>* Any other comments you would like to offer on this topic.
	>
	>Thank you,
	>Elizabeth
	>
	>************************
	>Elizabeth Caulfield Felt
	>Reference Librarian
	>Washington State University
	>Pullman, WA  99164-5610
	>509-335-8957
	>felt at wsu.edu
	>http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/faculty/felthp.htm
	>*********************************************