Searching Gale via RefWorks

Just a short note here to remind myself and others of what I discovered today about RefWorks. Apparently, as per phone call to Gale/Centgage Technical Support, z39.50 using RefWorks does not work with their new powersearch interface. They also said that at this point, customers cannot go back to the old interface anyway, so it’s a catch22.

Notes from JSTOR Forum (October 23, 2007, Boston, MA) – “Addressing the E-Journal Preservation Conundrum: Understanding Portico”

Addressing the E-Journal Preservation Conundrum: Understanding Portico
Presented by Ken DiFiore, Associate Director, Library Relations, Portico

Librarians transition to e-resources are well underway.

E-resources have unique characteristics
1. Generally licensed not owned
2. Technology dependent
3. Inherent fragility to the pace of technological change
4. Multitude of electronic formats

Questions
Who assumes responsibility for preservation?
How will long-term preservation be sustained?
How will the data integrity be maintained?
What objects should be preserved first?

Background
JSTOR started in 2002 as an electronic archiving initiative
They hoped that publishers would come to them to preserve e-only issues.
JSTOR also wanted to impact the broader community by assisting with the transition to e-only journals. So with the help of Ithaka Portico was born

Mission – preserve e-only scholarly material to remain available to future generations of scholars, researchers, and students.

Philosophy – utilizing best practices, to work in a cooperative way with libraries and publishers to balance the interests of both.

Initial Focus – open of all peer-reviewed journals, preserved journals may have a print version in addition to an version, or they may be available only in electronic format. They are now also looking at E-books.

Portico’s E-journal Archiving Service
42 publishers
6,200 titles
Range from commercial, university press, and professional society publishers.
Recently just signed a contract with Springer!
Current e-journal content (“born digital”) or digitized print (“reborn digital”)
Portico does not do any digitalization itself
Publishers sign a 3-year archiving agreement
Make annual contribution according to annual journals revenues (range from $250 to $75,000).
Content cannot be removed that is deposited with Portico
Majority have elected the option to allow Portico to satisfy post-cancellation access claims.

Look and feel of the value added feature that are part of the publishers interface are not captured for long-term preservation. The focus is on the intellectual content.
Publishers use XML markup and import it directly into portico. Along with and graphics, photos, and PDF of the article.
Reduces or eliminated the dependency on specific technology platform for future use of e-journal content.
If the publishers have the front and back matter or supp. Material they usually provide it.

Archiving Service Model
The content preparation is done for each including:
Transform of the xml to NLM DTD
Creation of a metadata record for each article (METS)
Validate of the format for each article
Scan for viruses
Portico is committed to keeping the data format viable and will convert the content if necessary as the formats change over time.
PDF’s are converted to PDF/A the archival standard for PDF format

Portico Preservation Infrastructure
Fully operational since Jan 2006
Ingesting publisher content at an average rate to approx .5 million articles/year (?? Need to check this number)
Nearly 2 million articles in the archive presently
Expected to exceed goal of 4 mill articles in 2007

Portico’s E-Journal Archiving Service Model
375 library participants now
Libraries sign a 5-year agreement
25% of libraries are from outside U.S.
Libraries are asked to make an annual support payment based on LME
Founders get a discount

ACCESS MODEL
Two scenarios
Trigger event – lost, orphaned or abandoned
Back issues are removed and not avail anymore
Publisher ceases
Catastrophic failure by publisher delivered platform for a sustained period of time.

You get access to the content whether you subscribed or not.

Portico Archive Access Model
There is a rider that publishers can sign about 2/3 (85% of titles) allowing portico to host issues in post cancellation event.

4 user names and passwords per institutions to audit

Benefits to libraries
Facilitate libraries in the transition to elec. Environment
Provide practical mechanism to address “perpetual access” needs.
Shared infrastructure or virtual stacks reduces preservation costs system wide.
Provides a means of assuring access to e-resources over the long term and protects against gaps in library collections.

Libraries can send them list of issn’s and they will compare this to what is in Portico’s holdings. This is free service.

We all need to ask publishers to designate Portico as the post cancellation preservation provider.

Openurl is coming
Doi should be transferred
Crossref is also implemented

Notes from JSTOR Forum (October 23, 2007, Boston, MA) – “Faculty Needs and Librarians Perspectives: Findings from Two Nationwide Surveys”

Faculty Needs and Librarians Perspectives: Findings from Two Nationwide Surveys
Presented by Meredith Quinn, Services Project Manager, Ithaka

Ithaka – is an organization that does incubation projects for JSTOR, like Aluka.

“In the summer and fall of 2006, Ithaka (http://www.Ithaka.org) commissioned an outside research firm, Odyssey, to conduct surveys of the attitudes and perceptions of academic collection development librarians and faculty toward the transition to an increasingly electronic environment. These studies received 4,100 and 350 responses, respectively, and were cosponsored by JSTOR and Portico and in part by Aluka and NITLE. The studies build on similar faculty studies conducted in 2000 and 2003; by examining the librarians’ perspective as well, we can gain a fairly balanced perspective of the dynamic environment. Considered together, the findings suggest the need for libraries to take leadership in helping academia’s transition to the new environment (Roger C. Schonfeldan, Kevin Muthrie, Educause Review, July/august 2007).”

JSTOR will be emailing the complete data analysis to us after the forum.

Survey consisted of responses from 1400 4 year intuitions, consisting of all the JSTOR Classes, from very small to very large.

44K faculty surveys were sent out, 9% came back
Market research firm they used, Odyssey , does a lot of work on immerging technologies.
Survey was also sent to collection development librarians, one per institutions was accepted. 350 surveys came back from this group

This survey has been done every 3 yrs. But this was first to include librarians

Transitioning to Elec. Only journals environment – Librarians
1. 20%, 1 in 5 librarians said hard copy will always be needed
2. 40% happy to see backfile hard copy replaced by elec. (backfiles)
3. 60%, 2/3 are ready to cancel current print journals subscriptions (current issues)
4. 20% said in the near future libraries will not have to maintain hard copy anymore

Librarians at research institutions are more likely to say we will not need hard copy in near future.

Faculty are more conservative
1. 40%, 1 in 5 librarians said hard copy will always be needed
2. 20% happy to see backfile hard copy replaced by elec. (backfiles)
3. 60%, 2 out of 3 are ready to cancel current print journals subscriptions (current issues)

Now by Discipline
Fine with canceling print in favor of e-only access

Bio 70%
Engineering 78%
Law 55%
Economics 70%
Sociology 62%
Classics 35%
History 40%
Philosophy 48%

Interesting findings
Economist and Biologist have near the same high comfort level with the transition to e-only journals. Why? Maybe due to workflow of economist, which is very online now, a change from older studies.

1 out of 3 in Classics field is comfortable with the transition. This is relative high.

Faculty on the issue of preservation and archiving of e-resources
Long-term preservation of electronic journals—how important? This is consistent across all disciplines, rating as very important.

How happy are they with the state of archiving for long term?
High satisfaction as a whole, but they don’t really want to get into the nitty gritty details of how to do it.

Librarians on the preservation and archiving issue?
How important now and in five years?
Very high priority, similar to the faculty. But place a much heavier importance on the the future (in five years).

Preservation of Hard Copies?
Faculty? — Higher if you ask them if important for some libraries but not mine. In other words it is important for someone to do it but not necessarily my library.

Ithaka is doing a research study to find out how many copies are important to keep in hard copy.

Librarians?
How important to preserving hard copy of reference material, journals, etc.?
Very important now but not as much in 5 years
It shows how important it is that the ARL libraries actually do take the lead with preservation. We really do need to think about this problem.

Value of Library Functions 2003 vs 2006
Survey looked at three functions:
1. Library as a starting point or gateway for locating information for my research (GATEWAY)

2. The library pays for resources I need (BUYER)

3. Library as a repository of resources–archives, preserves and keeps track of resources (ARCHIVE)

Buyer – even across both years
Gateway – down in 2006, decrease is mostly from the science disciplines. Are scholars googling more from their desk instead of using library resources, and is this bad? What does this mean for libraries?
Archive – even across both years.

Digital Repositories
Librarians – Does your institution have a digital repository for any kind of scholarly material? As would be expected the digital repositories are most widely available at the largest institutions. But even for the smaller institutions, digital repositories are seen as a very important function of the library.

For Librarians the top goal for a digital repository is the archiving and preserving institutional intellectual assets — 87%.

Contributing to a new framework for scholarly communication is also important, 47%.

For Faculty – Changing scholarly communication is low for faculty. Probable because they have a larger stake in the present system.

Faculty also do not know if there institution even has a digital repository.

Notes from JSTOR Forum (October 23, 2007, Boston, MA) – “Leveraging the Network: Building and Deploying a Collaborative Resources from and About Africa: An Introduction to Aluka. ”

Leveraging the Network: Building and Deploying a Collaborative Resources from and About Africa: An Introduction to Aluka.
Presented by Javanica Curry, Assistant Director, Library Relations, Aluka.

The need — resources from and about Africa are limited. Archives, libraries, and primary resource materials are dispersed and difficult to access. Digital resources can help level the playing field. Also oral tradition is hard to capture

The Mission — not for profit to put all these disperse resources online from and about
Africa.

Aluka approach — collection development: aggregate high quality curative collections from museums, libraries, etc., and put them in a digital library. They are also taking advantage of institutional contributions.

The technology — solid technology that is scalable, web based, and cost effective.

International partnerships — participation is critical. As participation grows so does understanding. Training librarians is important. Most critical is to make this project for the benefit of Africans.

Sustainability – participation, access, and contributions, technology, leveraging the network effect via participation.

Content area — African Plants Initiative – manuscripts, specimens, photographs, drawings, field notes, etc. Contains 288K objects.

Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa — historical sources documenting the struggle against apartheid. Includes newspapers, underground literature, government documents, correspondence, oral histories, finding aids, etc. Selected by 6 national committees of scholars. Contains 180K pages.

African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes — visual contextual and spatial documentation of African culture and heritage. 15 sites have been documented in phase I. 3D models, aerial photos, excavations, maps, notes, books, historic letters, GIS data, scholarly articles, photogrammetrics. Contains over 10K objects.

Aluka has a public site restricted to abstracts and thumbnails, indexed in Google. Member libraries can see the full site for a trial period until the end of the year. They want feedback from the membership. Contains all primary resource material with some secondary review material.

Objects can be measured and images manipulated using the image viewers tools.
You can save items to a MyAluka account. User can also share items in their MyAluka account with other registered users. Users can share saved items with up to 20 email addresses. But again, they must be members to access the data.

The content now in Aluka is just a start. It is important for the user community to participate. The content areas can grow but it depends on what becomes available from participants. This metadata is all indexed in Google.

Aluka is a discovery tool. We don’t need to put everything in that exists in Aluka, but have it serve as a starting point containing important items to serve as pointers to more extensive collections.

Free Access to  Aluka Available through June 2008.

Aluka is pleased to offer our individual users free access for the duration of the JSTOR Partner Preview.

You can create an Aluka ID to gain access through 30 June 2008. Your access will work both on campus and remotely.

• Learn more about how your institution can participate in Aluka for continued access.
• View a list of participating institutions.

Through your Aluka User ID, you can tag and save materials in the Aluka digital library, share your tags with others, add annotations to tagged materials, and save customized searches.

Questions? Please contact user_services@aluka.org.