Linking journal databases to the periodical collection

[Mark Jordan]

Hi Corey,

We've developed an electronic journals database (EJDB) that allows us to
manage access to electronic journals and that provides the user with the
most current listing of what's available. We're still building content but
it now contains records for about 3000 titles, including titles we get in
ejournal form as part of a print subscription, truly no-cost ejournals,
and titles in a couple of EBSCOHost databases and in ProQuest's
ABI/Inform. We can load various kinds of records into our EJDB, including
MARC records (but we only take certain fields - 245,246,110,710, and 6xx)
and delimited records. We have a loader for jake records as well and plan
to use it as a constant source of data.

We provide a separate search/browse interface
(http://mercury.lib.sfu.ca/cgi-bin/ejournals/EJDB?Display=BrowseForm) and
also load brief MARC records back into our OPAC. These records point back
to the EJDB record for a journal, where the user gets to choose which
version he/she wants (we already have as many as four different electronic
versions of some titles). It is in the EJDB record that the user also sees
any information about a particular version such as passwords, proxy
requirements, and where available the extent of the verion.

The only real usability problem we have is that since many full-text
databases can't provide access to journal-level holdings (only to
article-level holdings), we can't provide a direct link from our EJDB to a
journal's "entry" in the full-text database. This is true for the
EBSCOHost databases, for example.

As far as linking directly from bib databases, we use GODOT
(http://www.lib.sfu.ca/holdings/), which will provide links from a bib
record in a wide range of databases to full text (similar to ExLibris's
SFX) in two ways, either directly to the ejournal as represented in jake
or to any version that has an 856 field in our local catalogue. Since we
put our EJDB records back into our catalogue, users can get to any
ejournal that is listed in it as well.

Mark



Mark Jordan
Librarian / Analyst, Systems Division
W.A.C. Bennett Library, Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, British Columbia, V5A 1S6, Canada
Phone (604) 291 5753 / Fax (604) 291 3023
mjordan at sfu.ca / http://www.sfu.ca/~mjordan/