National Library of Australia - Gateways

ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 58| August 2002


E-Collection Sets: A New Service from Kinetica

Electronic Collection Sets

For many years Kinetica and its predecessor the Australian Bibliographic Network have been providing catalogue records for individual items contained within the major microform collections held by many Australian libraries. Development of this service continues, but a new focus has presented itself in the growth in popularity of e-journal aggregator services and other electronic full-text collections.

These largely commercial services allow access to highly desirable information by digitising indexes and full-text articles from reputable journals and making them available to subscribers over the Internet. The journals that are mined for articles are usually gathered into broad subject aggregations such as Meditext, which provides access to 100-plus Australasian medical and health journals indexed in the Australian Medical Index (AMI), or AGIS Plus Text, which contains full-text legal journals from Australia, New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific region via the AGIS (Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Information Service) database.

While these e-collections overcome the need for libraries to subscribe to individual journals, check them in and then house them in hundreds of metres of shelving, they do create the problem of alerting patrons and other institutions to their availability for consultations and possible interlibrary loan. This is where Kinetica’s new E-Collection Sets service can make a difference.

The service involves Kinetica Database Services obtaining or creating catalogue records for each electronic journal represented within a particular aggregation. Customer libraries can then request to have their holdings added to these records and a bibliographic record file output for loading into their local system. As mentioned above, this service is also available for other electronic full-text collections, such as the Pandora archive of Australian documentary resources maintained by the National Library of Australia in association with Pandora partner agencies.

The data sets supplied will contain unique bibliographic records describing the electronic items in each collection. If any electronic journal is represented in more than one collection it will be described in a separate record for each separate appearance. The records will also include all 856 fields (for the electronic location) contained in the National Bibliographic Database (NBD) record for each item.

The service will provide a base set of bibliographic records for each collection followed by quarterly updates where requested. The quarterly updates will keep customers abreast of new additions to the collections as well as withdrawals from them. Additions and withdrawals will be notified in separate output files.

The benefits of this new service should be apparent to library managers in that it provides an easy way of acquiring bibliographic data sets for electronic collections, and it improves access to electronic resources within the library, by incorporating records for these resources in the library catalogue. In addition, the responsibility of keeping the local catalogue up-to-date with what is and is not included in the electronic collection is shifted from local technical services areas, and the task of keeping holdings refreshed in the National Bibliographic Database is also effortlessly achieved.

Collections that are currently available include Australian Public Affairs Full Text, AGIS Plus Text, AusStats, Meditext, Pandora, and ScienceDirect. For more information regarding these sets and the service offered by Kinetica, be sure to visit the Electronic Collection Sets Internet site at www.nla.gov.au/kinetica/products/esets.html.
—Lenore Kennedy

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