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Annual Users' Meeting 2000

KINETICA EXPERT ADVISORY GROUP ON ACCESS TO ELECTRONIC RESOURCES (KEAG-ER) REPORT

 

Background
At the 1999 Kinetica Annual Users' Meeting, several library representatives raised the possibility of the National Library of Australia (NLA) addressing the issues around the provision of cataloguing records for the wealth of material available in the electronic databases and aggregator services to which they subscribed. Libraries indicated that they were not sufficiently resourced to cope with creation of bibliographic records for the thousands of titles contained in these electronic datasets.

The National Library, through consultation with CEIRC (CAUL Electronic Information Resources Committee) in late 1999, also identified significant issues and costs in providing access to these valuable resources.

Formation
The NLA considered that Kinetica's resource sharing services could be used to improve access to electronic collections in Australian libraries. To this end, the library appointed an Expert Advisory Group to provide advice on improving the availability of cataloguing and location information for electronic collections, and reducing maintenance costs in local systems and the National Bibliographic Database.

Terms of reference
The Kinetica Expert Advisory Group on Access to Electronic Resources (KEAG-ER) was established to advise the National Library on:

  • Identification of major electronic resources acquired by Australian libraries
  • Availability of cataloguing data corresponding to collections of electronic resources
  • Bibliographic standards for cataloguing of electronic resources
  • Preferred practice in reporting availability for interlibrary document delivery
  • Maintenance issues for NBD and local systems
  • Pilot project to demonstrate use of Kinetica to improve access to electronic resources

Membership
This advisory group was established on 8 February 2000 and currently consists of the following nominated and National Library representatives:

Mr Toby Burrows (WU) National Resource Sharing Working Group
Ms Ritva Matero (WU) CAUL Electronic Information Resources Committee (CEIRC)
Ms Annette McNicol Griffith University
Ms Glenys Oxlee Macquarie University
Mr Rob Walls National Library of Australia (Convenor)
Ms Roxanne Missingham National Library of Australia
Ms Chris Foster National Library of Australia
Ms Bemal Rajapatirana Manager, NBD (Secretary for KEAG)

Members of the KEAG-ER have expertise and experience in the management and delivery of electronic resources to library users, through reader, datasets, bibliographic and systems services.

NLA membership of the KEAG-ER has changed due to temporary changes in staffing, with Julia Trainor (the original convenor of the group) and Jasmine Cameron (NLA) temporarily substituted by Rob Walls and Chris Foster respectively.

The group works via a discussion list, and teleconferences are generally convened on a fortnightly basis.

The group also has observers who participate in the discussion list and teleconferences:

Ms Sandra Henderson Australian Library Collections Task Force
Ms Margaret Phillips Project Officer, Electronic Consortia and Licensing, NLA

Activities

Identifying key issues
The group identified a number of issues early on in discussions, including:

Cataloguing
Library managers need to share the costs of describing or cataloguing electronic resources.

Libraries currently adopt different practices when describing electronic resources locally including, cataloguing selected titles only, creating only brief item level records or collection level records, creating lists on the local web site, or using faculty liaison staff to promote the availability of certain collections.

Standards
Cataloguers have to adapt to a mixture of standards. International bibliographic standards for electronic resources exist, but are not applied uniformly. The single record approach (adding data about the electronic version to the record for the print version) is used by many Australian libraries, and is inherently more useful for end users. It offers concise on-line display but poses problems for libraries that do not acquire the electronic version. The broader issue here was the contention between the multiple versus single record approach for any bibliographic item, regardless of format, and the choice, or multiplicity of records available for both users and cataloguers.

Editing of URLs in bibliographic records was identified as an issue. In particular, whether tailoring of URLs in bibliographic records to individual libraries requirements should occur within the local system or when the records are output from the NBD. Libraries eventually only want to retain those URLs relevant to their own access arrangements.

Holdings and Document supply
There are efficiencies in standardising descriptions of availability and/or access; however, libraries do not have standardised licence agreements. Availability can vary from collection to collection, and also within collections depending on factors such as additional charges to supply, whether the subscribing institution is for-profit or not, and the availability of the print format in the libraries' own collection.

Holding statements in the NBD need to indicate ILL/Document Delivery agreements and availability. Libraries needed to manage user expectations in a climate of budget restraints where ILL requests have increased.

Technical issues included how to globally add holding statements (via programming) to a select, but variable, groups of titles within a collection. Libraries may subscribe to individual titles, subsets of titles, or have transactional access, (where a library does not subscribe to a title but has access to free document delivery), to titles within a collection. Transactional access title identification is problematic but important as libraries may not want to supply any holdings statements for such titles, or would want a statement to indicate restrictions on interlibrary loan. Whilst identifiers such as ISSN or Library of Congress numbers facilitate the identification of data subsets, these identifiers are not always present in bibliographic records or accurately transcribed.

Maintenance issues
Dataset records added to the NBD must be updated regularly and frequently to reflect new or dropped titles, extended coverage, and the usual split/merge/rename cycle of the journal titles themselves. This includes issues of how to alert local systems or provide periodic updates when changes occur.

Libraries also need to amend holdings as their license agreement changes, preferably through global or batch holding changes directly to the NBD.

The maintenance of URL links is a major issue for libraries, including how libraries could be alerted to changes or upgrades in URLs, and whether there are options to distribute responsibility for tracking changes, or for automating these activities on the NBD.

A Pilot Project
The KEAG-ER decided to 'learn by doing' and use Elsevier's ScienceDirect as the first dataset to explore cataloguing and maintenance issues. This Elsevier database is widely used in academic libraries and by CSIRO.

The NLA negotiated purchase of the bibliographic records corresponding to the ScienceDirect database from OCLC in April. At the same time, the KEAG-ER issued a draft bibliographic standard for the ScienceDirect pilot project which was distributed for comments, amended and posted to the NLA Web site in early May 2000 at scidirpilot.html.

In May, representatives of the KEAG-ER had the opportunity to meet with Elsevier in Sydney. Discussion covered the aims of this project; exploration of what information the company could provide regarding subsets of the database subscribed to by individual libraries, information regarding changes in journal coverage, backdating of issues digitized, and the situation regarding document delivery.

During June, ScienceDirect records were loaded to the NBD and libraries were notified (via Kinetica-L) and invited to comment on the records, or request global addition of holdings. The first holdings were added for University of New South Wales on 6 July, and at the end of July another call for holdings was issued to libraries.

There are a number of specific issues for the ScienceDirect pilot, in addition to those mentioned earlier, including:

  • the bibliographic data is not completely reliable or consistent. For example some records lack ISSN’s and there is some variability in the text of certain fields.
  • some data elements may not be specific enough, for example, most of the URLs in the original records linked the user to an Elsevier subscription information page.
  • some records for the collection were already on the NBD but reflected print and microform formats, potentially affecting loading and matching data on the NBD.
  • how to load holdings when libraries have partial subscriptions, and differentiating between transaction based and subscription titles
  • working with the publisher (Elsevier), to clarify issues around the standard licence agreement such as those clauses preventing ‘advertising or soliciting’ document delivery
  • managing the delivery of these records to libraries local systems in particular, exploring options on limiting output to only those records that do not exist in the local system in order to prevent the overlay of existing and preferred records in the local system.

Survey of databases

Prior to the establishment of the KEAG-ER, the National Library had informally surveyed how CEIRC libraries provided access to electronic resources. 9 libraries responded to broad questions on

  • how library users discover the existence of electronic resources
  • how other libraries know what is held in electronic form, including contributing records to the NBD
  • how other libraries know if any resources are available for ILL and Document Delivery

The KEAG-ER decided to extend and formalise the survey in order to identify the electronic collections that are held within Australian libraries, including those considered key or unique resources. In addition the survey should extract information on how libraries facilitate access to these collections, including the problems and issues they face in maintaining the data relevant to these collections.

This survey is being finalised and will soon be disseminated to a broad range of libraries.

Forward work plan
The KEAG-ER has the following activities in its forward work plan:

  • Identify key datasets that can be supported through acquiring and loading bibliographic and location data to the NBD to support shared cataloguing and document delivery. This activity will include communicating with publishers and suppliers of electronic resources about the availability of bibliographic records corresponding to their collections, and information that might support regular data updates.
  • Monitor new developments in standards and services. Electronic resources standards and services being developed internationally are very relevant in the Australian context. Adherence to international standards provides libraries with options and efficiencies in the way that data is sourced. The KEAG-ER will study work being done by other groups, such as the Library of Congress, Program for Cooperative Cataloguing, Task Group on Journals in Aggregator Databases who are working on similar standards issues. Libraries are also able to avail themselves of new and developing services. For example multi-publisher aggregator services are emerging with packages of titles supported by subject based access through sophisticated search engine services. The KEAG-ER will monitor trends in these services, in particular how such services compare with more traditional approaches to finding electronic resources such as indexes, abstracts and catalogues.
  • Developing a service model. This will include identifying the roles and responsibilities of key participants in electronic resource access such as libraries, publishers, suppliers of bibliographic data and Kinetica. A key decision will be determining which services and activities can be supported centrally and which will be performed locally.
  • Finalise bibliographic standards for electronic datasets. The ScienceDirect pilot applied general format and descriptive standards that uniquely identified the collection for future manipulation and extraction (830). The KEAG-ER always assumed that these standards would need revision towards completion of the pilot. In addition, the feasibility of adopting a single-record approach has yet to be explored. The KEAG-ER intends to prepare a discussion paper that will examine the implications of adopting this approach for local system, users and the NBD.

Conclusion
The KEAG-ER is very aware of the rapid speed with which the electronic resources/databases marketplace is changing, and is eager to hear from libraries regarding the options or services being offered them by suppliers, and the strategies that libraries themselves are developing to manage these resources effectively. This is particularly so, if these options or strategies appear to impact on possible service delivery models, or the specific areas of interest of the group.

 

Kinetica Expert Advisory Group on Access to Electronic Resources
August 9, 2000

Draft agenda Kinetica Annual Users' Meeting 2000