L&LR staff blog

Hopefully, you should have noticed a few recent changes to the Electronic Journals A-to-Z.

• First, we’ve all but completed the summer campaign to improve the accuracy of the 60-odd individual e-journal package holding files. Di, Adele, Carole, Phil, Elif and I have been working through each package in turn and using the most up-to-date information from the publisher/provider to improve the A-to-Z holdings. One or two inconsistencies still to iron out, and it’ll never be entirely bug-free (please carry on sending any mistakes that you spot to acquisitions@lincoln.ac.uk), but the quality of the data for our managed packages should be significantly better than it’s ever been. This review process is going to be [it's going to have to be] an annual event.
• Second, the ‘New e-journals at Lincoln‘ RSS feed has been updated through the summer to reflect the changes. Noting that EBSCO’s terms and conditions for use of the A-to-Z state that we ”may not distribute, encourage or allow distribution of [...] data updates“, I’m going to be restricting the RSS feed to just those packages where we, not EBSCO, are the source of the updated information (i.e. where we are managing the title lists directly). This includes the packages providing access to our individual title-level subscriptions: i.e. the ‘important stuff’.
• Third, and last of all, as I discussed with several people in my workshops at the L&LR awayday in June, I’ve revamped the A-to-Z home page ready for the start of the 09/10 session…
  As discussed in those workshops, I’ve taken a ‘just do it!’ approach. It’s not the finished article by any means – I’m relying on your initial and ongoing criticism, comments and ideas to take it forward – but we agreed: better to make changes then tweak as appropriate, rather than discuss ouselves into inaction.

(Image: the new A-to-Z homepage)

Compare with the old home page (below):

(Image: the old A-to-Z homepage)

The changes / new features include (hopefully these will ring bells with those of you who took part in the discussions):

• Generally – the aim has been to make the site more clean and simple.

1. The page ‘header’ – extraneous information (and slightly excitable formatting!) removed – just the name of the application (there was some discussion about dropping ’Electronic Journals A-to-Z’ in favour of ’E-journals Catalogue’ or similar, but now’s probably not the time for that) and the strapline with the number of titles.
2. The navigation tabs – I had hoped (and people had agreed) to reduce these to a minimum, replacing most of them (advanced search, subjects, etc.) with lower-profile links further down the page, but I encountered a problem – if I use A-to-Z admin to ‘hide’ a tab, it becomes impossible to link to that tab elsewhere. This is weird, and unfortunate in the extreme – unfortunately it’s something we’re stuck with for the time being. Inevitably, I’ve ended up adding to the number of tabs – as well as a new tab for the new home page, there’s also now a ‘Log in‘ tab which routes the user through Athens (and back to the homepage), which ought to help us to troubleshoot users’ full-text access problems.
3. A big, unmissable search box. Needs a better search button graphic, but it does at least now include a search tip (to subtly reinforce the idea that users should be searching for journal titles here).
4. See also the sentence on using the e-Library for initial subject keyword searching  – could we / should we expand on this?
5. More options – links to the other A-to-Z pages. I had intended these to replace the tabs entirely, but see (2). Maybe, given that, we don’t actually need these extra links?
6. Still to come – a screencast video showing the user how to use the A-to-Z in the context of a literature search. I’ll blog when that’s ready. Also need to revamp the ‘Help’ tab more generally.

So – what do people think?

Edit (8th July) – slideshare.net does not seem to like displaying these slides on-screen, so here they are to download in MS PowerPoint format.

Here are the slides (on slideshare.net) of the 5-minute lightning talk I just gave at Mashed Library 2009, on using ticTOCs data to display e-journal ToC feeds, and on creating a new-titles feed with Yahoo Pipes, etc.

You can now subscribe to my RSS feed of new e-journal titles via email, should you so wish.

• Here’s a link to the email sign-up form.

I prefer to keep up-to-date with RSS feeds using Google Reader (I don’t want or need anything more in my Outlook inbox!), but if email’s your bag and/or you prefer to have all your information in one place, then at least there’s now the option to add these to your inbox.

I have a feeling that there’s just too much in this feed (c.90 new titles added over the Bank Holiday weekend) to be useful as a public i.e. library-user-focused service. Too many titles, no subject filtering (yet…), too much (for want of a better word) noise in the form of low-academic-interest titles added to packages such as Factiva.

But I do think this could be a really useful current-awareness tool for Academic Subject Librarians.

In February, I wrote about  how I’d added more than 5,000 ticTOCs RSS feeds to the A-to-Z, so that researchers can easily find and subscribe to Table-of-Contents (ToC) updates from journals in their field. I think this is an indispensable current awareness service, and I’m pleased it’s being promoted at the ‘Working Smarter With the Web‘ workshops.

(An aside: that ticTOCs data is overdue to be re-generated and reloaded onto the A-to-Z. This is next on the long list of e-journal packages for the “e team” to review.)

That’s all well and good, but there’s a clear need for a current awareness service ‘one level above’ the individual ToCs. That is, we could (and should) be providing an RSS feed of new e-journal titles.

At the moment, the EBSCO A-to-Z platform doesn’t provide this feature (I really do hope it’s something that EBSCO are considering developing themselves), and so in the past we’ve had to resort to emails, spreadsheets, etc.—all with varying degrees of success—just to keep people up to date with what new e-journals have become available.

~~~

So, I’ve created a rough-and-ready working demo of a ‘New e-journals at Lincoln‘ RSS feed for the A-to-Z. It’s not supported by EBSCO, so it’ll require a bit of manual intervention to keep it running (it’ll be a nice five-minute daily task for the “e team” to take on!), but has the potential to be a really important enhancement to the e-journals service.

Next time you go to the A-to-Z site, you’ll see a new tab – next to the existing ‘Titles’ tab – which I’ve labelled ‘New Titles (RSS)‘. This new tab links to a page containing information about the RSS feed, with a prominent link to the feed itself, plus a display of the 10 most-recently-added titles in the feed.

The links in the ‘ten most recent…’ list should go directly to the A-to-Z record for that title. The feed link itself you can paste into your favourite feed reader (I use Google Reader). I’m working on enabling email subscription to the feed. We should also be able to take this feed and filter/manipulate it to create (for example) subject-specific lists in Blackboard.

I’ve also made the feed autodiscoverable (c.f. my earlier post), so it should display in the browser toolbar (this will vary between browsers).

This is how the feed is auto-discovered by Firefox browser.

I still need to do some work on creating better documentation for users of the feed, and for the process of adding new titles within L&LR.

I’ll also need to do a bit of testing to make sure everything’s working as it should be, and iron out my feed-validation bugs.

When the time is right, I’ll launch the service more publicly.

Paul

~~~

P.S. Here’s how I did it:

1. The first stage is the most clunky – it involves getting information about the newly-added titles out of the closed box that is the Electronic Journals A-to-Z. EBSCO provide a daily report (available only to administrators) of “Titles added to Packages in my Collection“. This data can be exported on a daily basis in tab-delimited format.
   
2. Next, I created a spreadsheet using Google Docs and published it to the Web. The tabbed data from the A-to-Z admin report is pasted in to the spreadsheet, so it becomes openly accessible. Using Google Docs also means that I can invite other people to act as editors of the spreadsheet, and create public web forms to add titles that don’t appear in EBSCO’s daily report (not all of our e-journal packages are managed by EBSCO, so the data will need supplementing when we add custom titles).
3. The data output of the Google spreadsheet is then fed into Yahoo! Pipes, an excellent application for ‘mashing up’ and processing data. You can inspect the Yahoo! pipe for yourself, at: http://pipes.yahoo.com/lincoln/newejournals. If you create an account on Yahoo!, you can clone this (or any) pipe and modify it to create your own data mashup.
   
4. The Yahoo! pipe takes the raw Google spreadsheet data, filters it according to various rules, and exports a valid * RSS feed of new items, in reverse order by date.
5. * Well, it’s nearly valid. I need to do a bit of cleaning up of the pipe (I did say this was a working demo), mainly so I can pass the feed through Feedburner, which will allow email subscriptions. But it works well enough!
6. Finally, I created the new tab on the A-to-Z public site, and added the details to the page (the ‘ten most recent’ list was created using feed2js). The code for the autodiscoverable feed was pasted into the top of our customised A-to-Z template.

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Academic librarians are unhappy that some of the UK’s largest university business schools are being asked to pay extra to be allowed to link to articles published in a key journal in their field.

Harvard Business Review (issn:0017-8012), published by HBP (Harvard Business Press), has long been available as part of the EBSCOhost Business Source suite of databases.

However, in an email to the chair of the BBSLG (British Business Schools Librarians Group), EBSCO outlined that, as a vendor of HBP’s content, they are obliged to disable persistent linking to Harvard Business Review, at the publisher’s request.

According to EBSCO, the terms & conditions of their supply of HBP content have always included a clause limiting use of the journal to individual, private study, and explicitly prohibiting linking from Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) for teaching purposes.

Three libraries have already had their facility to create persistent links removed, according to the BBSLG, who have written a letter of complaint to EBSCO.

A flyer circulated by EBSCO ‘invites’ individual BBSLG member-libraries to upgrade their EBSCOhost Business Source subscriptions to a level which would “continue to allow [the institution] to persistent link to HBR articles for an additional annual fee“: each institution’s fee being calculated on past use of the journal and their business-school student numbers.

For one, Russell Group, UK university, EBSCO have demanded £15,000 in order that the institution be allowed to go on creating persistent links for use in teaching.

According to correspondence between EBSCO and the BBSLG, Harvard Business Press are concerned that unauthorised persistent-linking from VLEs to EBSCOhost has harmed HBP’s separate provision of course packs for HEIs on a commercial basis. They cite a “direct quantifiable link between the two which can be clearly demonstrated financially between the diminishing course pack use and persistent linking“.

Should institutions decline the opportunity to pay the additional EBSCOhost fee, EBSCO asks that they inform their users that persistent-linking from a VLE to the HBR is not permitted, and that EBSCO may disable the ability to create such links.

This will not only remove the ability of academic staff to create links from a VLE, but also break any persistent links to the e-journal created by individuals in the course of their own personal study or research.

~~~

This is a retrograde step for usability in online scholarly content. Storing, recalling, and broadcasting stable hyperlinks is fundamental to the Web. It is not an add-on or a luxury.

Private, subscription-only environment it may be, but users of EBSCOhost [remembering that this includes fee-paying students] have had the rug pulled from under a basic Web experience. It may currently affect only one journal title, in one database, but this is a dangerous precedent, and one that the library community has a right to question and challenge.

Paul

More than 36,000 e-journal titles are listed on our A-to-Z, but student and staff interest is not spread equally between those titles.

Plotting a graph of the individual usage of each title shows a sharp ’spike’ of concentrated use within a very small number of titles, and a very long tail of thousands of titles which are barely used, if at all. In fact, as a raw graph it’s almost impossible to read, as all the action takes place at the extreme right-hand edge (click the image for bigger):

Some comparisons to put the distribution of usage into context:

A single title—the British Journal of Social Work—is responsible for 5% of all of our e-journal hits via the A-to-Z (5,185 hits in the last year). This is fairly remarkable in itself. What’s the secret there?

Anyway, imagine that this one e-journal (0.0027% of the total number of titles) is represented by the area of the West Common in Lincoln: about 100 hectares. Remember that 5% of all our A-to-Z usage is here.

Photo by Julian Beckton

The next 10% of A-to-Z usage can be accounted for by just 14 titles. If one title is the Lincoln West Common, then 14 cover an area about the size of the London Borough of Islington (or Windermere, if you prefer): approx. 6 square miles. These 14 titles each receive between 500 and 5,000 hits/year.

(Scale outline maps reproduced from Ordnance Survey map data by permission of the Ordnance Survey © Crown copyright 2001.)

The next 366 titles get fewer than 500 hits/year (39% of total usage) They tot up to just a bit bigger than Rutland, the smallest county in England (not counting the made-up counties), at 147 square miles.

We’re getting in to the beginning of the long tail now: 2,365 titles (the East Riding, including Hull, pushing 1,000 square miles), with 50 hits/year or fewer - this represents the next 34% of usage.

And 6,122 titles; 5 hits/year or fewer; south of the river to Lincolnshire, at 2,687 square miles the second-largest English county. Just 12% of our total A-to-Z usage from 17% of our titles.

Finally, 75% of all our e-journals - 27,745 titles in total – are never used via the A-to-Z.

That’s zero A-to-Z hits in the last year, although it’s quite possible they’ve been accessed via the native database or publisher interface, or through tools such as Google Scholar. To represent those 27,745 unused titles at the same scale, we’d have to use…

…Belgium, which won’t fit on this page.

Imagine that: a medium-sized European country full of e-journals, and none of them used. Quel dommage! Or, if you prefer, Een welk medelijden*.

*Reckons Babelfish. I don’t speak Flemish.

I’ve just completed version 1.2.1 of the LibraryLink help guide for staff, and put it online.

It now includes instructions on how to link to an e-journal article using Find it @ Lincoln (our new OpenURL link resolver, for anyone who’s missed it!).

Paul