NASIG Webinar: Troubleshooting Electronic Resources with ILL Data

NASIG Newsletter, Mar 2016

By Stephanie H. Wical, Published on 03/04/16

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NASIG Webinar: Troubleshooting Electronic Resources with ILL Data

Serials & E-Resources News Kemperman 0 S. S. 0 Brembeck 0 Brown 0 E. W. 0 de Lange-van Oosten 0 Giffi 0 Levin 0 Morrison 0 Ruschoff 0 Silvis 0 G. A. 0 White 0 access: A cross-industry white paper. Dublin 0 -SuccessStrategies.pdf 0 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. - 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)


This is a preview of a remote PDF: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1735&context=nasig

Stephanie H Wical. NASIG Webinar: Troubleshooting Electronic Resources with ILL Data, NASIG Newsletter, 2016, pp. 15, Volume 31, Issue 1,