Staff Papers

Electronic Resources: New Issues for Library Systems with New Solutions

A paper by Roxanne Missingham, Assistant Director General, Resource Sharing Division, National Library of Australia, given at the ADLUG meeting September 2001, Rome


Abstract:

Libraries are increasingly subscribing to electronic journals and databases to meet the information needs of their clients. There are many complex issues associated with management of records for electronic products which require new and innovative services from library systems. The Australian National Bibliographic Network, offered through Kinetica using AMICUS and LibriVision, is tackling issues of record creation, access and discovery of electronic resources. The Kinetica service supports resource sharing in the Australian library network and the developments described in this paper provide a model for supporting access in the electronic world.

Introduction

In the 1990s libraries changed significantly, developing new services and processes primarily to deal with the expansion of electronic resources in their collections. These resources have resulted in changes in the management of acquisition, access, bibliographic records and resources sharing between libraries. Previous changes in libraries have tended to be evolutionary, with the movement from hand duplicated to printed books the most significant. This development resulted in increased collections and new libraries. The Internet has brought a far more radical change, with the number of resources now available wildly surpassing the changes in traditional printing, and requiring rapid change in all library services and systems.

To understand the challenge posed by electronic resources to the National Library of Australia’s Kinetica service it is useful to review why electronic resources are different to traditional library use of print material. The most outstanding characteristic is the volume of titles that are acquired in large electronic subscriptions. ScienceDirect1, Elsevier’s electronic journal service, contains approximately 1,000 journal titles. netLibrary2, the new ebook vendor, includes 40,000 eBook titles, covering from arts, history, literature, religion, science, sociology, business, and technology. ProQuest3 contains more than 4,000 full-text publications from over 3,000 of their publishing partners. Other services are equally large, for example Ebsco’s Electronic journal service4 has over 7,000 titles and OCLC’s Electronic collection online5 has 3,000 titles. To acquire a new service then involves managing a large number of title records, quite a different scale to acquiring traditional printed material on a title by title basis.

The issues involved in managing electronic access are also more complicated. Title management has become a major issue with services having titles added and deleted regularly, and in addition the progressive digitisation of retrospective material means the journal issues available change frequently. Information from these changes needs to be included in the catalogue to enable library clients to access all the material to which libraries have subscribed. The integrating nature of many electronic resources and the change from access at the level of the serial title to the article level, typified in the development of preprint services, also raise new issues for the management of access and discovery of these resources.

Authentication and access require considerable investigation and many Australian libraries offer local authentication system to which library clients must log on. Others use IP authentication. User licences are more complex with many conditions which may conflict with general copyright provisions, and which must be managed for each product. Archiving and managing for access including the provision of reader software such as Realpage and Acrobat, and more complex file management for multimedia formats ensure that delivering a service to library clients from electronic products is a complex and challenging activity.

Australian libraries have quickly taken up electronic services as a means of providing quality service for their clients. For example6 Australian universities: electronic serial subscriptions 1999 indicate the 38.9% of all current print and non print serial titles are electronic format serials (89,364 or 229,558 titles), with the average university library (mean figure) acquiring 41.4% of its current serial titles in electronic form.

This experience is in line with the transformations occurring in Europe and the United States 7, where hybrid libraries manage digital and print resources. The increasing volume of electronic resources through electronic journal and database subscriptions has been magnified by the move to consortia, particularly in the United States.

For a network service, such as Kinetica, assisting libraries to efficiently meet all these challenges, particularly given the increasing importance of electronic subscriptions in Australia is a critical development.

Role of Kinetica and the Australian National Bibliographic Database

Andrew Wells8 paper to the AMICUS-DOBLIS LIBIS User Group has outlined the scope and nature of the National Library of Australia’s Kinetica service. Kinetica is provided using AMICUS (for online cataloguing) and LibriVision (for online searching). The Australian National Bibliographic Database is the cornerstone of Kinetica’s service to Australian libraries. It provides a means of enabling Australian libraries to share information of resources available in collections across the country, enables libraries and library clients to identify where material is located, share bibliographic records and also order inter-library loans and copies using the Kinetica Document Delivery System. Kinetica is used by over Australian 1,100 libraries.

Kinetica offers access to the Australian National Bibliographic Database (NBD), Australian National Chinese, Japanese and Korean Service and the Research Libraries Group union catalogue and is an essential service for Australian libraries and their clients. Database size and usage figures reflect this high value:

Australian National Bibliographic Database at 30 June 2001

  • Bibliographic records 12,149,739
  • Authority records 1,591,630
  • Holdings 33,213,340

Contribution to the Australian National Bibliographic Database for 2000/01 showed a high use of the service:

  • Holdings added 3.23 m
  • Original cataloguing (online & batch) 659,906

6,104,738 searches were undertaken on Kinetica in 2000/01, 97% of searches were made of the Australian National Bibliographic Database.

Kinetica, and in particular the National Bibliographic Database, is used extensively by libraries to provide a service to their clients, to locate resources, share records and request inter library loans.

Electronic resources and Kinetica/Australian National Bibliographic Database

The Australian National Bibliographic Database has contained descriptions of electronic resources from the days of CD ROMs and discs. In the move to publishing on the Internet there has not been a significant increase in coverage of these electronic resources, other than for Australian online resources which are preserved in the PANDORA Archive9. Records for the many collections available through library collections are not comprehensive, and have been identified as a high priority for acquisition. Currently we have records for approximately 65,000 electronic resources in the database.

Recognising the growing importance of managing electronic resources, in February 2000 we established the Kinetica Expert Advisory Group on Access to Electronic Resources (KEAG-ER), 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. The National Library considered that Kinetica's resource sharing services could be used to improve access to electronic collections in Australian libraries.

Members of the KEAG-ER covered state, academic and the National Library and had expertise and experience in the management and delivery of electronic resources to library clients, through reader, datasets, bibliographic and systems services. Some of the activities of the group were:

Science Direct Pilot Project: a pilot project was conducted to use Kinetica to provide national access and resource sharing for the Elsevier ScienceDirect collection of over 1,000 electronic journals.

Bibliographic and Holdings Standards: Bibliographic Standards for the ScienceDirect Pilot, established a basic data format to be adopted in the bibliographic records and holdings statements for the ScienceDirect records obtained from OCLC. The paper also proposed three recommended holdings statements.

Survey to identify electronic collections in Australian libraries: a key activity was a survey to identify major electronic collections held in Australian libraries and to seek information on how Kinetica’s services can be utilised to improve access to, and management of, electronic collections in Australian libraries. The Survey to Identify Electronic Collections in Australian Libraries found:

  • 44% of respondents do not provide document supply from any electronic collection
  • 37% provide document supply contingent on the specific licence agreements for each collection
  • 80% provide access via library web pages
  • 70% provide access via web pages and their library catalogue
  • 10% provide access only through the catalogue
  • 85% record the holdings for different formats on a single catalogue record
  • 15% record holdings for different formats on separate records
  • 50% selectively report holdings to the NBD

The group made many recommendations and these have been considered by the National Library, the Kinetica Advisory Committee and the Kinetica Annual User Meeting. The full report can be found on the National Library of Australia’s Kinetica website at http://www.nla.gov.au/kinetica/eag_aer_survey_report.html

In addition to these activities focus group research with Australian libraries was held early in 2001 to obtain information on the key issues affecting the use of Kinetica, resource sharing and changes in library operations

Model for support for electronic resources from Kinetica

The model for the provision of services from Kinetica has had three important components:

  • The database which enables libraries to locate materials held in Australian libraries
  • Bibliographic services that enable libraries to acquire records for their local systems
  • An inter library loan system which enables the requesting of material from other libraries.

While these are the traditional services of a bibliographic utility such as RLG’s Union Catalog and OCLC’s WorldCat in addition the National Library of Australia is committed to expanding the service to include:

  • A one stop location service for publications, particularly commonwealth government publications
  • Improved coverage of bibliographic records of electronic publications and updates to ensure these records are current
  • Increased use by clients of libraries to locate material themselves, recognising that many library clients belong to more than one library (academic, public, state, national and often a special library as well)
  • Services to support the increased use of Kinetica for records of electronic resource including link checking reports and update/refresh electronic datasets services.

Some of the critical issues for the service include improvements in response time, development of services and continued work on bibliographic standards to ensure we have consistency across the network.

The Kinetica model has been focused on inputs and outputs. The challenge in implementing Kinetica essentially drove the model, due to the requirements for technical solutions to be found to access to and development of the National Bibliographic Database. The current model is:

Method to
contribute
of records
  Online using
AMICUS
  Batchloading of
records via ftp
  Web Input
Form
 
               
      National Bibliographic Database        
               
Access Online using
LibriVision
  Local
catalogues
(records from
NBD)
  Z39.50 through
local system
(including the
Kinetica
Document
Delivery
System
  Special services
such as RAAM

The new model for Kinetica includes clients of library customers and services to libraries. These are intended to ensure that there is ease of access to information and that services which enable libraries to deal efficiency with electronic resources. The input methods remain the same, including the use of the newly developed web form. The services however are significantly expanded:

Record input:   National
Bibliographic
Database/
Kinetica
  Services to
clients of
our library
customers:
  1. Searching the holdings of all Australian libraries and Australian publications such as government publications.
1. Online using AMICUS           2. Through LIDDAS (a consortium of 20 libraries that is currently implementing Fretwell-Downing's VDX software to support distributed ILL management and messaging) and other local ISO compliant systems request inter library loans
2. Batch loading of records           3. Future development - saved searches, simple search interfaces, sorting of results
        Services to libraries:   1. Searching the holdings of all Australian libraries (and records from other libraries e.g. LC, BL)
3. Web input form           2. Electronic product services such as sets of records for products for catalogues and eresource discovery services, and (future) web link checking reports
            3. Resource sharing through Kinetica Document Delivery and the Payment System
            4. Bibliographic products such as records for their local systems

In order to implement to new service model the following strategic issues were identified:

  • Web input form including URL, enabling easy contribution for data and access through fire walls,
  • a one-stop shop approach,
  • improved coverage of e-resources, Science Direct pilot being the pilot for this approach,
  • orientation for use by clients of libraries, requiring simple searches, saving searches, sorting results and improved response time, and investigation of NBD support for end-user ILL requesting (LIDDAS) and borrow direct type schemes,
  • continue work on standards, results of LC conference, bibliographic and holdings standards from science direct project, standards for e-resources section.

One of the most significant developments in the past 12 months has been the development of a new record input method. In July the Web Input form was launched to enable libraries to contribute records, particularly records of electronic resources using metadata type information, without having to send batches of records or use the AMICUS cataloguing client. The form was launched at the Kinetica Annual Users Meeting and is currently in pilot. It is intended to be used by libraries that are originally cataloguing a small to medium number of records each year, and are not currently using the cataloguing client. A number of these libraries have firewall problems which mean they cannot contribute other than through a web form, some also are unable to use ftp to send files.

While those using the form do not need to have knowledge of the MARC format a simple abbreviated MARC record is subsequently generated for addition to the AMICUS database. The use of such template methodology can be readily adapted to the creation of records using other data schema such as Dublin Core, using codes which allow identification of electronic resources.

The web form is currently:

Web form
Web form
Web form

The pilot of the form by libraries indicates that there is a strong need for such a simple input service for records of electronic and print resources. The help information describes how to use the fields including language commonly used in metadata descriptions. The metadata can be used to provide a bibliographic record, which is put into a MARC schema. Interest from Australian libraries suggests that the recording of electronic resources in metadata is consistent with developments in universities with open print archives and in organisational use of metadata on web services.

Standards for electronic resources

In a library network service to which many hundreds of libraries contribute records for electronic resources the issue of standards is increasingly important. In the next year the Joint Steering Committee for the Revision of AACR will complete its revision of the rules for electronic resources and these will be available to libraries. In the meantime libraries have established practices over the past 10 years, most commonly in the past 6 years to ensure that they catalogue electronic resources.

While Kinetica established guidelines for the reporting of holdings as advised above the clarification of areas where there are variant practices is a high priority. We will be issuing a set of guidelines or standards in the next quarter to assist Australian libraries. The most complex issue in many ways is that of the decision as to whether to create a single record for material published in variant forms, such as in print and online, or whether to use multiple records. Interestingly the survey of the Kinetica Expert Advisory Group on Access to Electronic Resources found that 85% record the holdings for different formats on a single catalogue record so we will take this into account in framing network best practice guidelines.

Future support for electronic access through Kinetica

In the transition from print to hybrid libraries we have seen a number of experiments in Australian in resource discovery mechanisms. Many libraries have produced separate electronic resources lists for their clients, some have used databases to product the services, while others have used the catalogue as the one stop shop. In developing more efficient services to assist and manage electronic access the role of the National Bibliographic Database is becoming critical. Our library clients have suggested that the core role of Kinetica is facilitating resource sharing and efficiencies in library processes are even more essential when we have increasing number of titles and services to support.

The future directions seem increasingly to involve improving the services from Kinetica. Some of the specific developments which are critical for Kinetica are:

Service developments:

  • Support for the creation and management of metadata using schemas other than MARC including Dublin Core and for this to be available as a seamless service for searching,
  • Development of metadata harvesting functionality to obtain data for the National Bibliographic Database,
  • A simple search interface that has a look and feel similar to that of a web search engine which allows keyword and phrase searching on selected indexes, consistent with library clients expectations from their web searching,
  • Implementation of the OpenURL standard, to enable the development of linking services to provide for quality services competitive with those of Ex Libris (SFX) and Crossref10.

Product developments:

  • Improvements in response times so that as databases become larger with the acquisition of more electronic records library clients can search efficiently,
  • Link checking services to enable regular reports of electronic resources to be maintained through checking and correction,
  • Further development of web input interfaces,
  • Import and export of data in formats other than MARC including Dublin Core,
  • Export of data in file formats other than MARC, e.g. XML,
  • Development of the AMICUS client so a URL of more that 55 characters will work,
  • Hypertext links from the headings (author, title, subject) in a bibliographic record display directly to the bibliographic records that are attached to that heading (currently it is necessary to run a new search before being able to view the bibliographic records),
  • Support for of institution specific Electronic Access and Location (MARC tag 856) data including password controlled updating and institution specific export

The challenges for library systems to enable libraries to efficiently and effectively manage electronic resources are significant. After early trails with databases and html pages libraries are increasingly finding library clients expect a one-stop shop. Where the catalogue and special web services are produced to enable access to electronic services efficient workflows for records are critical to maintain quality and timely service. Issues including response time and interfaces to meet client needs require significant developments. In an environment where library collections are approaching 50% electronic the directions for Kinetica need to support a new set of services for librarians and library clients.

Footnotes

1 http://www.sciencedirect.com/

2 http://www.netlibrary.com/

3 http://www.umi.com:8090/proquest/

4 http://www.ebsco.com/ess/services/online.stm

5 http://www.oclc.org/oclc/menu/eco.htm

6 http://www.caul.edu.au/stats/caul99.xls

7 For example Vok, K.(1998) Waar is de bibliotheek?: een transformatie naar Kenniscentrum. Where is the library?: a transformation into the Knowledge Centre, Informatie Professional, 2 (6): .26-9; Meyyappan, N., Chowdhury, G. G., Foo, S. (2000) A review of the status of 20 digital libraries, Journal of Information Science 26 (5): 337-55; Arms, W. Y. (2000) Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press

8 Wells, Andrew 1999 Kinetica: the implementation of AMICS and LibriVision, AMICUS-DOBIS/LIBIS Bulletin newsletter, 17 (3): 71-76

9 http://pandora.nla.gov.au/index.html, currently includes approximately 1400 titles all of which are catalogued on the Australian National Bibliographic Database

10 See Van de Sompel, Herbert and Oren Beit-Arie (2001) Open Linking in the Scholarly Information Environment Using the OpenURL Framework," D-Lib Magazine. 7(3) http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march01/vandesompel/03vandesompel.html; Van de Sompel, Herbert and Oren Beit-Arie. 2001 Generalising the OpenURL franework beyong references to Scholarly Works: the Bison-Fute model, D-Lib Magazine. 7(7/8). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july01/vandesompel/07vandesompel.html, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/openurl/

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