[WEB4LIB] Linking journal databases to the periodical collection

[Eric Hellman]

Many databases, such as Ebsco Online and Proquest allow you to insert 
links to your holdings link server. This is likely to rapidly become 
a universal feature

Our version of Jake makes it easy for you to make it a link server 
for your library, and it's free under LGPL.

ExLibris's SFX is a full featured link server- what they showed at 
midwinter ALA was very impressive.

Eric

At 1:50 PM -0800 1/19/01, Cory Stier wrote:
>I'm interested in finding out if and how other libraries are enabling users
>to link what they find in a journal database to what's in a local periodical
>collection. Specifically, if a user locates a citation for an article in a
>database, how do they find out whether the library has access to the
>required journal - either in print or fulltext in another database?
>
>In our library, I've set up all our databases so that they appear in an
>IFRAME tag, with our online periodical list appearing in another IFRAME tag
>(see http://www.rdc.ab.ca/library/cgi-bin/databases/eric.chtml for example,
>but make sure to use IE and not Netscape to view). This allows users to
>search our online periodical list for a journal, without having to open a
>second window. Incidentally, our periodical list runs under PHP and MySQL..
>The reason I went with the IFRAME tag rather than just using frames, is that
>I had Javascript issues with many databases. This has meant that we have had
>to encourage our users to use IE, because Netscape doesn't support the
>IFRAME tag. However, I would prefer to come up with a non-browser specific
>method of doing this.
>
>Ideally, I would like to automatically link citations found in a journal
>database with our periodical list or the library catalogue so that when a
>user locates a citation of interest in a database, they will know
>automatically whether or not they will have access to the required journal.
>Has anybody been able to do this? If we don't have access to the required
>journal, it would also be nice if we could automatically populate our ILL
>form with the required information from the citation in the database. I
>would be interested in home-grown solutions, as well as any commercial
>products that might do what I'm interested in.
>

Eric Hellman
Openly Informatics, Inc.
http://www.openly.com/           21st Century Information Infrastructure
LinkBaton: Your Links that Learn     http://my.linkbaton.com/