EDINA newsline
March 2010: Volume 15 Issue 1
The coming year will be critical for the library and information sector as we give priority to ensuring that researchers, students and their teachers have both ease and continuity of access to online journals.
With SUNCAT we set out to achieve the wish of JISC and the Research Libraries Support Programme (RLSP) to meet the demands of the community for easier access to information on ‘who holds what’ across the 70 largest research libraries. A new link to SCONUL Access (see below) for borrowing rights now complements the link via electronic tables of contents such as Zetoc to the articles on the ‘digital shelf’.
The focus also has to be on continuity of access, not only because of the financial squeeze on library budgets but also, more fundamentally for reasons of digital preservation, to ensure that what is now available in digital form will always be usable. EDINA has been working with JISC Collections to scope an entitlement registry for NESLi2 deals to assist with end-user access to e-journal back copy if current subscriptions have to be cancelled.
A section of the EDINA website has been set up to collect together our activity in ensuring continuity of access, whatever the form of licence – subscription or open access: http://edina.ac.uk/ensuringaccess.html. Please tell us what you would like to see us doing to help.
As part of the development of the SUNCAT service we envisage a ‘blue flag’ to indicate which e-journal is being kept safe by one or more of the archival agencies that have been stepping forward. This is based on the PEPRS project activity with the ISSN International Centre to support an e-journals preservation registry service. We are on track to release a public beta service; meanwhile, we can demonstrate a prototype using sample data from CLOCKSS, e-Depot, Portico and the UK LOCKSS Alliance.
These and other initiatives will be discussed at a workshop being sponsored by the Digital Preservation Consortium, JISC and EDINA: “e-Journals are Forever?” at the British Library in London, 26 April. We hope to see some of you there, and we plan to report back on this important area.
Around ten new libraries will be added to SUNCAT throughout 2010. These include a range of Higher Education and specialist libraries selected on factors such as the uniqueness and size of their serials collection, their geographic location and the quality of their serials bibliographic data.
The first of the new libraries, to be added in the next few months, include:
A full list of the existing 70 contributing libraries is available at http://www.suncat.ac.uk/description/contributing_libraries.html.
Links to SCONUL Access have been added to enable users to find out quickly about getting access to journals they have discovered or located using SUNCAT.
SCONUL Access is a reciprocal access scheme, granting borrowing privileges to many types of library users working or studying at participating Higher Education libraries in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
The links are available from the top right-hand side of the full-record display in SUNCAT. Clicking on the link takes users directly into the SCONUL Access site where they can find out about their access and borrowing rights to over 170 UK Higher Education libraries.
For those SUNCAT contributing libraries which are not included in the SCONUL Access scheme, we advise visiting the library’s website to check access arrangements. Links to the contributing libraries’ websites are available in the left-hand column of the holdings display in SUNCAT (or see the link above).
SUNCAT enables its contributing libraries free download of MARC21 records provided by the ISSN and CONSER. Until recently SUNCAT has not provided access to the MARC records of other contributing libraries because of concerns about intellectual property rights with regard to records supplied by third-party organisations. The SUNCAT team have now reached agreements with these suppliers to make all five million MARC records in SUNCAT available for download by our contributing libraries.
Before expanding the service, however, we are taking some time to find out how the existing service is used and how it could be improved. Six interviews have been conducted and an online survey has been distributed to cataloguing staff at our contributing libraries. The results of this consultation will ensure that the service expands and evolves in response to user requirements.
The SUNCAT service is free to all our contributing libraries, with details of how to set up and configure the Z39.50 connection on the Help and Support page of the SUNCAT website.