Web Advisory Group Home > Minutes > 7 January 2004
Minutes - 7 January 2004Present: Hennig (minutes), Edelman, Duke, Quirion, Skuce
guests for SFX topic: Peter Cohn, Patty Durisin, Margret Branschofsky, Greg McClellan1. Update on proposals sent to designers
We sent our RFP to 7 designers, including Hecht Designs, who designed our site last time. Three of them were unable to work with us during this time frame, which leaves four designers that will be submitting proposals. The deadline for them to submit proposals is Jan. 16. At our next meeting we'll look over the proposals, decided on any more information that needs to be gathered, and select a designer to work with.
Our goal is to get the new home page ready for release in June.
2. Serials Solutions/BELL imports to Vera
We looked over the newest version of "test Vera" with the BELL titles imported. We came up with slightly different wording for the top of the "aggregators" page. We recommended adding a note to the Vera FAQ about the downtime during nightly backups (since this might increase when the Vera database is bigger). Nicole will make this addition.
All imported records link to the title level for individual journals within these packages except for Factiva and some Ethnic Newswatch titles. Since Factiva can't be linked to at the title level, Darcy has created a page to link to from Factiva records which tells users how to find individual journals. Nicole will contact Serials Solutions to find out why some of the Ethnic Newswatch titles go in to the title level and some don't. We may need to add some information for users about this also.
Nicole will bring this to VOLT next week for additional discussion. Now that we have most of the details worked out, we would like to go ahead with doing this, perhaps in mid-Februray when we get the next update from Serials Solutions.
3. SFX topics:
We were joined by: Peter Cohn, Patty Durisin, Margret Branschofsky, Greg McClellan
- SFX full text finder (Citation Linker)
We heard back from ExLibris that the promised updates to the Citation Linker for Q4 2003 are postponed until Q2, 2004 with the release of SFX, version 3. We've been waiting for changes to the search that would allow users to do a more inclusive journal title search, such as "title begins with" or "words in title." (The current version requires users to know and enter the exact title, exactly as it appears in the SFX Knowledgebase, otherwise is says we don't have the title). After that update, we'll look again at how we can make this available to our users and where to position it in relation to Vera and Barton and the rest of our site.
- Barton as an SFX source
Darcy and Stephen met before the meeting to look at what other institutions are doing with making their OPAC an SFX source. They presented their findings to us. We looked mainly at University of Ghent and University of Iowa.
If something is an SFX source, by default the SFX button appears on every record.
Links to OPAC and ILB and Ask Us: We had hoped that there might be some interesting things we could do with some of the other SFX "services." However, it seemed after discussing it, that everything we could offer, would be redundant and lead users in a loop. For example, in Ghent's catalog, there is an SFX button for every record, and when you click on it you get a menu with a link back to the catalog record that you are already on. The links to ILB in the SFX menu wouldn't make sense to show unless you don't find an item in the OPAC, not for items that we already own. As for Ask Us, we already have links to it from Barton.
Links to full-text e-journals: In Iowa's OPAC, they found a way to show the SFX button only for journals, not other items. If we did that, we could have a link to the e-version of a journal in the SFX menu that would work from off-campus, unlike the current URLs in Barton, which don't have the proxy server string appended to the URL. This would be an improvement for users, since it would make all the e-journals work from off-campus (if it's possible for them to work). However, we wondered whether it would be worth the work to implement it if this is the only improvement. Users can already get to the e-journal from the OPAC (without going through SFX) if they are ON campus. And people can use Vera to get to e-journals from off-campus, and Vera includes additional licensing and restrictions information for users.
Links to finding more works by the same author: We discussed turning on the "getAuthor" service from the SFX menu linked from OPAC records. The idea would be to find more works by the same author in our e-journals, databases, or other full-text sources, such as DSpace.
However, since there is no authority control on authors' names in DSpace and most of our other sources of full text, this would result in confusion, since it wouldn't necessarily find everything for that exact author, and would find things by other authors with close, but not exact matches. And you can already find more works by the same author within Barton, just by clicking on the author's name (WITH authority control). So we thought this would be more confusing than helpful.
Tasks: As a result of this discussion, we decided on two bits of further information gathering. Darcy will compose a message to send to the SFX listserv, asking what uses other institutions are thinking of, or implementing with their OPAC as a source. Maybe we'll find that there are other uses we haven't thought of. Nicole will talk to Tracy about how easy it would be to only show SFX buttons for journals in the OPAC (since Iowa is doing it, there must be a way). And would it be possible to have even more precise logic that controls whether an SFX button would appear? Such as only for MIT Press out of print books? (the button could lead them to DSpace). But what would be the unique identifier for those? (MIT Press ISBNs would also include IN print books).
Conclusion: For now, it seems that the only useful improvement that would result from making Barton an SFX source, would be to make the links to e-journals work from off-campus. After we find out the answers above, we'll discuss this again at a future meeting.
- Dspace as an SFX source & target
DSpace as a source, doesn't make sense for the same reasons Barton as a source doesn't. It would lead users back to itself. DSpace is a final destination for full text, not a database of citations to full text that lives elsewhere.DSpace as a target, does make sense, though. For example, if you began in Worldcat as the SFX source, you could follow a link from a record for an MIT Press out of print book and end up with the full text of the book in DSpace.
Also, many of our databases contain technical reports that might be found in DSpace. One could imagine clicking on an SFX button in a database and getting a link to the full text of the report in DSpace.
In order for Greg to experiment with getting this to work, we recommend turning on DSpace as a target in the test instance of SFX. Nicole will contact Jennifer about this, and Greg and Margret will do some testing to see how it will work. One potential problem is that there are no standards for these technical report numbers (unlike books and journals with ISBNs and ISSNs). So it may take some tweaking.
Next meeting:
Wed., 1/21/04, 2-3:30, Barker Conference Room
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Web Advisory Group Home > Minutes > 7 January, 2004