NEW E-JOURNAL SITE LICENSES MAKE RESEARCHING ARTICLES IN ROWLAND A SNAP

The Rowland Medical Library at the University of Mississippi Medical Center has recently expanded its reference capabilities for electronic journals, making online journal article searches by UMC faculty, staff and students faster, more precise and more efficient.

According to Ada Seltzer, professor and chair of academic information services and director of the Rowland Medical Library, new site licenses for electronic subscriptions for previous print subscriptions negotiated by the library since December 2006 also have increased the number of journal titles available to its patrons without increasing costs.

“We’re adding these non-subscription titles relevant to our health sciences library,” Seltzer said. “Individuals can get to these additional titles by going to the library’s Web site, accessing any journal to get to ScienceDirect, then searching for the additional titles.”

Last December, the library signed a contract with ScienceDirect, an online information source for scientific, technical and medical research publications, that expanded the number of available titles to more than 900.

Three other libraries in Mississippi have a similar contract with ScienceDirect – the libraries at the University of Mississippi, Mississippi State University and the University of Southern Mississippi. The contracts allow each of these institutions to view the electronic journals to which the other institutions subscribe.

“We’ve found that what our users want most are electronic titles,” said Walter W. Morton, professor of academic information services. “Now, in addition to having e-access to the current issues of the journals we had print subscriptions to, we can also give them electronic access to older e-volumes back to 1997 – something that was not available before the contract – plus access to more journal titles from the other institutions.” 

Seltzer and her staff made sure the Rowland Medical Library would have archival rights to the journal titles it was acquiring electronically. It proved to be a move of significant foresight: many institutions lose access to all issues of an electronic journal if a subscription is discontinued.

The library recently signed a contract with TDNet, a vendor that helps libraries effectively manage and use their electronic resources, to improve access to e-journals. The service lists all of the available journals and years of coverage and provides links to specific issues.

One of TDNet’s electronic research tools is Tour Resolver, which helps individuals navigate available journal titles with ease.

“They can click on a link and see what volumes we have,” Morton said. “People doing a search in a database sometimes find an article in a journal, but they will not know if they have access through the library. Tour Resolver can link them to the full text if that is available, or take them to the library catalog to check the holdings if it is only available in print.

“If a title is not available electronically or in print, they can link to an Interlibrary Loan (ILL) form to obtain the article. With Tour Resolver, the user is not left hanging with no place to go. It provides options depending on the availability of the resource from the library.”

The ILL system is a borrowing and lending service libraries have with one another.

Seltzer said the Rowland Medical Library logo appears on all citations in a search retrieval where the full text is not immediately available from the database being searched, including all journal sources available from the library. 

“You don’t have to go back to our journals page to find out if we have the title or not,” Seltzer said. “It’s a tremendous benefit, because the user doesn’t have to question whether or not we subscribe to a specific journal electronically. Now, anytime our symbol shows up, you’ll know whether we have e-only access or whether we have a print copy; if we don’t have either, you can click on the ILL link and order it.”

“Most larger publishers restrict ILLs in such a way that individuals can print an article on a piece of paper, but they cannot save an electronic version,” said John A. Lucas, assistant professor of academic information services. “But we can print the requested article, fax it or deliver it through the mail. Our standard for ILLs is that 75 percent of the requests must be completed within a 24-hour time period.

“With the proliferation of desktop e-access, this feature saves the researcher time.”

Lucas hails TDNet as the “wave of the future” for electronic journal access because so many publishers offer their titles’ table of contents electronically.

“Researchers can do an article search using these tables of contents,” he said. “They can search for articles over the last 18 months. The table of contents for every journal we have may not be available, but we’re getting there.”

Seltzer said the Rowland Medical Library and other libraries in rural and poor states participate in the Educational and Informational Science Program (ESIG) from the U.S. Department of Education, which maintains a contract with Springer Publishing in Germany that allows the libraries to archive journals in their permanent archives.

“We are in the third year of this agreement,” she said. “ESIG libraries have a large enough subscription volume that Springer has made available e-access to any Springer or Bedford journals they publish, approximately 1900 journals in all.”

Morton said now that journals are referenced electronically through a vendor such as TDNet, library staff are able to determine which titles are most appropriate to purchase, a valuable asset in challenging economic times.

“We get statistics on use by title,” he said. “We can actually see how many times articles are downloaded, specific titles are referenced, etc. So we have real numbers about which journals are being used. That data was never available before.”

Lucas said although the majority of Medical Center faculty and students do their electronic journal searches on OVID and PUBMED, library staff is continually creating and updating e-journal databases.

“With all these open-source tools, the user has many more sources than these,” he said. “We’re constantly trying to find new and add more quality, peer-reviewed publications that aren’t getting displayed in PUBMED.”

For more information on how to access electronic journal titles, visit the Rowland Medical Library Web site (http://www.library.umc.edu/) or call the library at 4-1290.

—Bruce Coleman (10-1-07)

2007-09-28 00:00:00 17378