Information Science Section [SA]

E-journals - issues for catalogue access

A paper by Jay Douglas presented at The Net Effect://all things to all libraries/? Seminar on 23 July 1996, an activity of the Information Science (South Australia) Section at The Levels Campus, University of South Australia.
Jay Douglas is the senior cataloguing librarian at the University of South Australia Library

Introduction

This discussion aims to explore generally the practical issues of cataloguing and access of e-journals, and also look at what the University of South Australia Library is planning to do to enable its users to access those e-journals relevant to the Library's collecting direction.

There are two questions which libraries seem to ask when confronted with the issue of cataloguing and access of e-journals:

Why provide access to these resources in your library's catalogue?
How can you effectively organise access to these resources in your library's catalogue?

1. Why provide access via your catalogue?

This first question is a valid one, because until quite recently a library's catalogue has been seen as providing access to information held in material owned by the library. E-journals technically aren't owned by the library. To answer this question we can look at the definition of a catalogue. AACR2 defines a catalogue, "in a wider sense", as "a list of materials prepared for a particular purpose (eg an exhibition catalogue, a sales catalogue)". So the purpose of a catalogue is to provide access to information resources; ownership of the resources is not an issue. There is a great deal of valuable information available through the Internet and World Wide Web, and this information needs to be organised for accessibility. This can be achieved in the short term by using existing cataloguing procedures to create records for retrieval in a library's online catalogue.

The catalogue record is central to retrieval of this information. It describes the item, including its intellectual content, and it provides access to the record from a number of different points eg subject, author, title, ISSN, notes, etc. However until recently it hasn't supplied direct access to the item itself, eg. select a field in the catalogue record and get taken to the electronic text.

We are moving towards the interactive catalogue. Library catalogues can now contain a mixture of traditional (eg. print and non-print) resources, and access to digital resources. Libraries may provide access in their catalogues to serials which are only available electronically, or which are available in print form as well as electronically. Most libraries with serial collections have faced the situation where a print journal ceases to be issued in print form, but continues in electronic form (usually available on a Web Home Page). This information needs to be included in the catalogue for the benefit of the library user. The next logical step is to provide direct access to the electronic journal text from a field in the catalogue record. The library catalogue of the future will integrate access to all resources. It will provide access to traditional bibliographic records, and a gateway to networked information.

2. How can you effectively organise catalogue access to electronic journals?

This question is a little more problematical to answer, because of the speed at which developments in this area are occurring. Libraries currently organising catalogue access to electronic journals have tried to identify what is needed to do this effectively. Many libraries are limited by technology and budget in the sort of access they can provide to e-journals and attempt what is achievable in the short term, while monitoring progress on some of the more important general issues.

Some of these general issues are outlined below; many of these were discussed during the course of the ALIA 11th National Cataloguing Conference, held October 19th and 20th, in Sydney, 1995. The "wish list" for the future cataloguing of e-journals is:

Augment cataloguing data with additional information and/or links to resources. This makes the catalogue record the initial entry point for access to the electronic full text, and/or meshes it with finding aids to locate information. Current cataloguing tools, especially AACR2, may need modification to cope with this task.
Metadata Expand the use of metadata embedded in the digital object or text, and find ways of integrating different kinds of metadata with MARC. Metadata has been defined as "data about data". It is information about an electronic resource which may be embedded in the resource. Currently work is being done to define a metadata record which adequately describes a wide range of electronic objects. The aim is to give the authors or information providers associated with electronic resources the means to describe the resource themselves, to a defined standard. The idea is that in describing the resource you need something which is more informative than an index entry, but less complete then a formal cataloguing record.
Archive the electronic journal to provide future access. This will be important where the whole journal issue is replaced electronically when the new issue is published; co-operation with other libraries may reduce the cost of doing this.
Identify obsolete URLs. One problem in providing catalogue access to electronic information relying on a URL as a location device is the instability of URLs. Some libraries have overcome the need to manually check for the continued existence of URLs by having a software program which checks for obsolete URLs and goes off and finds their replacements.
Work to define standards for the stability of electronic resources. Archiving may solve part of the problem of the fleeting nature of some Internet resources, but is an approach confined to individual libraries or groups of libraries. A national solution to the future of electronic resources is required. Moves to have electronic resources included in the next Copyright Act revision, scheduled for 1998, will assist this problem.

At the level of your own organisation, user demand will generally mean that you can't always wait for the "major" problems to be solved before trying to offer access through your own library catalogue. The University of South Australia Library has recently been looking at ways of letting users know about the availability of e-journals. The library catalogue, the traditional point of access to information, is being used for this purpose. We've recently done a short trial of downloading bibliographic records for e-journals from ABN into our local Dynix system. We expect to start systematically adding records for e-journals to the library catalogue as they are requested by our liaison librarians.

In future we will be regularly downloading records for e-journal titles from ABN into our local catalogue. If we can't find a record for the electronic form of the journal on ABN, we'll download the record for the print version and change it locally to reflect the fact that it is electronic.

This means adding a few fields to the record - Type of computer file or data note (516), System details note (538), and Electronic location and access (856). We intend to map the 856 (Electronic location and access) because it contains the URL of the e-journal. We can then produce a report of URLs from the system and check to ensure that they are still current. The 538 also contains the URL; we would like to have this field display in the nonMARC record view in our library catalogue.

We are also hoping to set up a search menu option for e-journals.

LEADER 00942nas 2200253 a 4500
001 abn96086656
008 960502c19959999vratr pz 0 uua0eng d
019 1 12180687
019 abn96086654
022 1326-4214
040 ANL-S$cANL-S
043 u-at---
082 0 304.2805$220
082 0 745.205$220
245 00 Ecore design newsletter$h[computer file]
246 13 $iTitle on electronic version:$aEcoReDesign newsletter
260 Melbourne :$bNational Key Centre for Design at RMIT,$c1995-
362 0 Vol. 1, no. 3-
500 Title from title screen.
516 Text (electronic newsletter)
538 Mode of access: internet and World Wide Web. Available at http:/daedalus.edc.rmit.edu.au/ERDNews/index.html

650 0 Design, Industrial$xEnvironmental aspects$zAustralia$xPeriodicals.
710 2 National Key Centre for Design.
856 7 $uhttp://daedalus.edc.rmit.edu.au/ERDNews/index.html$2http

Title: Ecore design newsletter
Author: Number of Copies: 1
Library/Collection/Call Number Format Status
1. USA Electronic Active
UND Periodicals Internet Address:
http://daedalus.edc.rmit.edu.au/ERDNews/index.html

v.1:no.3 -

When doing some background reading prior to starting our assessment of making e-journal titles available in the library catalogue, two main considerations emerged in terms of user access. One is that library users as with any other information resource, must be able to regularly find the information they need to be confident enough to use an electronic resource. The catalogue entry provides a valuable aid for this. The other is that they prefer a "one-stop-shop" approach to finding information, ie moving direct from the catalogue entry to the electronic resource.

At present we don't have a command to take the user direct from the catalogue entry to the electronic text, but it has been identified as something we should work towards. In the interim we plan to set up a list of e-journals which we have catalogued on the Library's Home Page, and provide a hotlink from the title to the electronic text.

Sources

Assessing information on the Internet: toward providing library services for computer-mediated communication By Martin Dillon ... [et al.]. Dublin, OH: OCLC Office of Research, 1993.

Brindley, Lynne J Are they being served? D-Lib magazine article on networked information users' needs
http://mirrored.ukoln.ac.uk/lis-journals/dlib/

Cataloging Internet resources: a manual and practical guide Nancy B. Olson, editor.
http://www.oclc.org/oclc /man/9256cat/toc.htm

D-Lib magazine
http://www.dlib.org/

Global Digital Library Conference Report in LC cataloging newsline, v.4, no. 1 (Jan. 1996), ISSN 1066-8829.

Guidelines for the use of field 856 Rev. March 1996. Prepared by the Network Development and MARC Standards Office.
http://www.loc.gov/marc/856guid e.html

Interactive Electronic Serials Cataloging Aid (IESCA)
http://www.library.nwu.edu/iesca/

Projects in machine-retrieval for automated metadata index searching
http://http2.sils.umich.edu/

Mapping the Dublin core metadata elements to USMARC
http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/marc.ht ml

Tools for serials cataloguers: a collection of useful sites and sources
http://www.li brary.vanderbilt.edu/ercelawn/serials.html

Warwick metadata workshop: a framework for the development of resource description
http://mirrored.ukoln.ac.uk/lis-journals/dlib/

Weibel, Stuart. Metadata: the foundations of resource description
http://mirrored.ukoln.ac.uk/lis-journals/dlib/

1 December 2000 comments | privacy | copyright
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