Internet Resources in

by Jack Fitzpatrick

Introduction

Hello all. A couple of weeks ago I was asked if I'd put together some sort of report on where we stand with electronic resources in AubieCat. Although I happened to be the one asked to write the report, many people are involved in this process. Paula Sullenger, Tom Sanders, our student employees, the catalogers and the subject specialists - all these people have devoted a great deal of time and effort into getting these titles into the catalog.

The project(s)

First, I'd like to bring you up to date. As many of you are aware, last fall the decision was made to add records for serials for which we have access through our aggregator subscriptions - ABI/Inform, Business and Industry, etc. - and we have made great strides in this project. At the same time, we were also trying to insure that the titles in some of our other, smaller, packages had made it into the catalog. All titles from Project Muse, JSTOR, the Ovid Biomedical collections and others are now in AubieCat. Another large category of materials are those for which the publishers provide access to the electronic counterpart of the print, so long as we continue to maintain a current print subscription. We wanted the catalog to reflect this extra access as well. Then there were the free resources, the standalone databases, and various other resources related in some way to titles we hold in print - all of these needed to be added to the catalog.

Current status

At present there are some 4285 links from titles in the catalog to electronic resources. For electronic serials, we list and maintain holdings (coverage) information.

Searching

For maintenance purposes, we needed to code these records in such a way that we could retrieve titles from various categories. For instance, we have access to many Springer-Verlag titles, and since their coverage online is subject to change, we needed to be able to pull a list of these and have student employees check our data against theirs.  It occurred to us that at the same time, we should be able to use this coding to aid reference personnel and collection development subject specialists. We wanted to make it possible to do things like retrieve a list of titles in Project Muse for which we also had current print subscriptions. To accomplish all of this, we used the 710 tag on the bibliographic record. Normally used to provide an added entry for a corporate name, we have in the past utilized this field to track titles in the microfiche collection Statistical Reference Index. The nice thing about using this tag is that anyone who knows the codes can retrieve alphabetical lists of titles by doing an author search from the OPAC. Here's how.

Electronic Serials

If you go to the web OPAC, choose the Author/Title/Subject search screen, and do an author search for "QEJ", you'll see a list of all 38 categories of ejournals in the catalog, as shown below. Clicking on any one heading will retrieve a list of titles within that category.
#  Titles  Heading  Heading Type
1 19 QEJF DBI corporate name
2 53 QEJF FEJ corporate name
3 16 QEJFC AIP corporate name
4 6 QEJFC APS corporate name
5 48 QEJFC ELSV corporate name
6 17 QEJFC IOP corporate name
7 12 QEJFC PEJ corporate name
8 16 QEJFC RSC corporate name
9 11 QEJFC SIAM corporate name
10 82 QEJFC SPRINGER corporate name
11 9 QEJFO AMS corporate name
12 459 QEJK ABI corporate name
13 606 QEJK ASFTE corporate name
14 583 QEJK BIDB corporate name
15 5 QEJK CBI corporate name
16 8 QEJK CBII corporate name
17 12 QEJK CBIII corporate name
18 415 QEJK EAA corporate name
19 35 QEJK JSTOR corporate name
20 21 QEJK MUSE corporate name
21 307 QEJKC ABI corporate name
22 584 QEJKC ASFTE corporate name
23 61 QEJKC BIDB corporate name
24 8 QEJKC CBI corporate name
25 5 QEJKC CBII corporate name
26 4 QEJKC CBIII corporate name
27 636 QEJKC EAA corporate name
28 63 QEJKC JSTOR corporate name
29 26 QEJKC MUSE corporate name
30 3 QEJKG ABI corporate name
31 10 QEJKG ASFTE corporate name
32 3 QEJKG EAA corporate name
33 1 QEJKM ABI corporate name
34 35 QEJKM ASFTE corporate name
35 16 QEJKM EAA corporate name
36 3 QEJP PEJ corporate name
37 1 QEJP RSC corporate name
38 3 QEJX FEJ corporate name
Selecting one of the headings will give you a list of titles. I've selected QEJFC APS, which will return a list of American Physical Society publications that we can access electronically (as long as we keep the current subscriptions.)
# OPAC Name Headings Search  Complete Title  Author  Date 
1 QEJFC APS Physical review. A. 
 
 1990
2 QEJFC APS Physical review. B: Condensed matter. 
 
 1978
3 QEJFC APS Physical review. B, Condensed matter and materials physics. 
 
 1998
4 QEJFC APS Physical review. D: Particles and fields. 
 
 1970
5 QEJFC APS Physical review. E, Statistical physics, plasmas, fluids, and related interdisciplinary topics. 
 
 1993
6 QEJFC APS Physical review letters. 
 
 1958

Categories

By now you're probably wondering what these odd-looking codes mean. We began by dividing these resources into three basic types: QEJ, QER, and QR (the Q, by the way, is used to discourage false hits). These codes, entered into the 710 subfield a, represent Electronic Journals, other Electronic Resources, and Related resources respectively. In addition, we wanted to be able to distinguish them by acquisition type. F is the qualifier that stands for Free, K for part of a package, etc. QEJFC, for instance, means that access is Free as long as we have a Current subscription. After each QEJ code in the table above, is another group of letters. This is from the subfield b of the 710, and can represent one of three things: either it's a package/aggregator (e.g., ABI), a publisher (e.g., SPRINGER) or more information regarding the category. Sometimes it can be a bit redundant, as in the case of FEJ for Free Electronic Journal - we already know that - but as we'll see for the QR category, this field can be quite informative. You should be aware that when you retrieve a single record for one of these titles, these codes do not display; the only way to see them is by doing some sort of author search, or to check the MARC record itself.
Below is a complete list of Subfield A categories and qualifiers, and Subfield B Codes. We will also maintain a current list of these codes at: http://www.lib.auburn.edu/catalog/sercat/codes.html.

Subfield A Categories

 
QEJ  Electronic Journal
QER  Other electronic resource
QR  Related electronic resource

Acquisition Qualifiers

 
C  We also have a current print sub.
F  Free, no strings attached
FC  Free as long as we maintain a current subscription to the print
G  We receive free print version also
K  Part of a package
M  Microforms and Documents also receives this title
N  We receive through NAAL membership
O  Other (see note field on MFHD) 
P  Paid separately
X  Link temporarily disabled (site undergoing revision, etc.)

Subfield B Codes

 
ABI  ABI/Inform
ASFTE  Academic search FULLTEXT Elite (Ebscohost)
AIP  American Institute of Physics
AMS  American Mathematical Society
APS  American Physical Society
BIDB  Business & Industry Database
CBI  Core Biomedical I
CBII  Core Biomedical II
CBIII  Core Biomedical III
CORC  Free site from the CORC database
CORCA  Free "authority" site from the CORC database
DBI  Doing Business in ... (Ernst & Young Series)
EAA  Expanded Academic ASAP (InfoTrac)
ELSV  Elsevier Publisher
FDB  Free Database
FEJ  Free Ejournal
FMG  Free Monograph
IOP  Institute of Physics
JSTOR  the JSTOR package
MUSE  the Project Muse package
PDB  Paid Database
PEJ  Paid Ejournal
RLO  Related - Latest Only
RNA  Related - Now Available at
RR  Related Resource
RSA  Related - Selected Articles
RSC  Royal Society of Chemistry
SIAM  Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
SPRINGER  Springer-Verlag Publisher

Other Electronic Resources

Searching QER as an author retrieves the following list:
#  Titles  Heading  Heading Type
1 7 QERF CORC corporate name
2 1 QERF CORCA corporate name
3 6 QERF FDB corporate name
4 2 QERF FMG corporate name
5 2 QERN PDB corporate name
6 22 QERP PDB corporate name
The first two listings are for the CORC records; look for many more of these to be added in the near future. Following that are 6 free databases, a few monographs, databases from NAAL, and finally the 22 Paid Databases. Selecting that heading will retrieve a fairly good list of the major databases to which we subscribe. Of course there are more than 22 - we are working on adding titles to this list.

Related Resources

Doing an author search for QR will return the list below.
#  Titles  Heading  Heading Type
1 4 QR RLO corporate name
2 4 QR RNA corporate name
3 30 QR RR corporate name
4 5 QR RSA corporate name
These Related Resources are ones for which it was not deemed necessary to input either a separate bibliographic record, or to attach a World Wide Web location holdings record to an entry already in the catalog. Instead, the URL goes in the bibliographic record, and serves as a type of note. For instance, the RLO records will have a clickable note that says something like "Latest Issue at http://www...", but the holdings will only list the print issues held by the library. The RNA code is one we'll be adding more of soon. This code indicates that the resource is "Now Available at http://www...". Quite soon, we'll want to search the catalog for print records which have been cancelled in favor of electronic equivalents, and add URLs to them.

More Categories and Codes Anyone?

Using keyword searching, it is quite possible to build queries that return very specific subsets of our electronic resources. But the searcher should bear in mind the fact that we were initially adding these 710 codes primarily for our use in Cataloging - they may not return the exact lists that you'd like to have. Let us know what you'd like to see, and we'll try to add codes or qualifiers to make it happen. Please, though, do so as soon as possible. With only four thousand records, it would not be too impractical for us to do some redesigning of the coding. But as that number gets larger it will become harder to do so. So experiment, tell us what you need, and we'll do our best to provide it for you.

Outlaws

In addition to the 4000 or so URLs that we know of in the catalog, there are many others - I call them "outlaws". These are URLs that arrive unannounced, usually on MARCIVE tapes or on OCLC records downloaded to the system. As we run across these, we are adding 710 codes when appropriate (we don't do so for Government Documents). We will try to make sure that these URLs do indeed lead to an active site.

Maintenance

Voyager 98.1 came with a canned report that checks all of the clickable 856 URLs in the system. We run this report every other Monday, and with it we can at least insure that most URLs link to something. We can't, however, be certain that our description is still correct - the site may have been modified, it may no longer be free, etc. To do that, we need to have someone actually click on the link, visit the site, and compare it to the record in our catalog. We've found that last step is quite important. Let me give you an example.

Hacking for Girlies

The HFG review is a free semiannual publication reporting on the activities of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. It was available on the web at www.hfg.org, and my link-checking program was reporting no errors with the link. However, in October of last year I visited the site and was surprised to find not the HFG review, but a site called "Hacking for Girlies".  It's not quite as bad as it sounds. The site included a complete set of instructions on how you can hack into other people's web servers and replace their content with your own. The site was mounted anonymously, (and illegally? - I think so) apparently by a couple of young women involved in this sort of thing. Eventually they were chased off, the HFG review is back online, and we're more conscientious about personally checking these sites and not relying on automatic link-checking.

Future Plans

We are taking requests! If you know of a web site that you think should be added to the catalog, please let the subject specialist know. They will review the site, send Paula or me the information, and the resource is most likely on its way into the catalog.
 
 
 
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