NASIG Webinar: Troubleshooting Electronic Resources with ILL Data
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0 NASIG Webinar: Troubleshooting Electronic Resources with ILL Data Reported by: Stephanie H. Wical
Beth Ashmore, metadata librarian for serials and electronic resources at Samford University Library and co-author of the book The Librarian's Guide to Negotiation, gave a presentation entitled “Troubleshooting Electronic Resources with ILL Data.” She opened with describing a common experience when PMID (PubMed Identifier) searches were not functional after her library switched knowledge bases and link-resolver vendors in 2011. One patron did not contact the library, but complained on Twitter that the resource not working. Eventually, the tweet was discovered by a library employee, who then forwarded it to Ashmore. Because her library's users do not always directly communicate with her and her colleagues when resources are not working, Samford University Library developed a proactive approach to finding out when these instances occurred - they began examining ILL data. Quoting Karen Janke (2007), Ashmore affirmed the notion that ILL cancellations are “the indicator species of the library…a species whose presence, absence, or relative well-being in a given environment is indicative of the health of its ecosystem as a whole.” Because there are users who do not verify if a library has an article before requesting it through ILL, cancelled ILL requests (due to the library having the item) are a great source of information to determine if users are not able to access these subscribed resources, and thus, they are an indicator species.
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Ashmore noted that the first example of the problem of
incorrect or inaccurate data was solved by contacting
the vendor. However, with the second example, she
had to suspend article-level linking to the target
databases for a particular vendor and rely on
journallevel linking. This prevented the problem of the user
encountering a dead end or requesting something
through ILL that users are authorized to access.
Users at Samford University are told to look for the
“Full-Text at Samford” link off to the right of citations in
Google Scholar, but Ashmore discovered that in many
cases the link was hidden under a “More” button in
Google Scholar results. This is the last small link under a
citation, which users are unlikely to select. Initially,
Ashmore thought this occurred only with new titles that
have not been tracked by Google Scholar for long, but
later found that this hidden link issue happened with
resources that they have had for some time.
Unfortunately, they have not been able to resolve this
problem with Google Scholar.
The third core problem encountered by users at
Samford University is incorrectly mapped metadata.
Ashmore provided the example of a citation from a
database for an article that was formerly open access.
To fix this problem, she had to involve the link-resolver
service provider so the copy at the other side of the link
was the appropriate copy for her users. She stressed
that vendors embrace consistent data formats and
noted that most users are not likely to take advantage
of the revise citation option to fix the incorrectly passed
metadata.
Ashmore addressed workflow issues related to her
project. ILL staff involving her in all correspondence
regarding cancelled requests was not sustainable in the
long term. The ILL staff provided her and her assistant
with access to the ILLiad database so that they could
run queries in order to examine cancelled requests. This
process provided them with ideas about how they can
improve access to electronic resources at Samford
University. They identified education graduate students
as users who submit numerous ILL requests and may
need additional instruction and outreach to ensure that
2 NASIG Newsletter
they can better navigate the library’s discovery system.
Users are also now provided with OpenURLs in the
email notifications that they receive from the ILL
department. As a result of the collaboration with ILL,
holdings information in OCLC’s World Cat is frequently
updated so that users are not making loan request for
items not available for lending. They considered
interface design and considered trying one-click again
and thought about how to give users a better
understanding of the results they see. This approach
has compelled Ashmore to think about how to handle
print and open access resources.
One participant asked: “Have you noticed a difference
in the number or types of requests that you are
getting?” Ashmore responded that they saw a huge
reduction in the number of requests for articles that are
freely available after they provided a Google Scholar
link.
The Samford University Library provides document
delivery for faculty and staff, but not for students. The
philosophy at Samford (...truncated)