Licensed Database Transitions 2012: bepress/De Gruyter, Project Muse, Wilson/EBSCO, ProQuest
Several CDL and campus licensed databases will be transitioning to new platforms in the new year. Below are several of the upcoming changes:
The academic publisher De Gruyter is acquiring the Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) portfolio of 67 journals in the areas of Law, Business/Economics, Humanities, and Natural Sciences; UC licenses 50 of these. The transition to De Gruyter will take place in January 2012.
Project Muse is scheduled to transition to a new platform on January 1, 2012. CDL has encountered issues when using the search interface when accessing the resource using WebVPN and EZProxy. These issues have been reported to Project Muse. More information will be forthcoming.
Two video tutorials for searching and browsing within the new interface are now available. Additional instructional materials will be provided shortly after the platform launch. View and share the new tutorials here:
Search Books and Journals on Project MUSE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhldo-sLktk&feature=youtube_gdata
Browse Books and Journals on Project MUSE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrR9wM-R2dM&feature=youtube_gdata
The new platform will provide digital access to over 14,000 books from 66 university presses and related scholarly publishers, alongside MUSE’s over 500 electronic journals. A search box on every page of the site offers users the option of searching both books and journals, or filtering by content type prior to running the search. At the search results level, users may again filter to just books or just journals.
At launch on January 1, all of the books in MUSE’s new UPCC Book Collections will be visible in search results and when browsing on the platform. Users at libraries which have purchased or subscribed to book collections on MUSE will have full-text access to content from those collections.
MUSE will provide a one-month preview period during January 2012 to allow librarians and scholars to discover the significant breadth and depth of both book and journal content available on Project MUSE. At the end of the preview period, January 31, 2012, search results will default to only content to which the searcher has full-text access. At this point, users will have the option to toggle the search to show all available books and journals relevant to a search, if desired.
Several indexes on the H. W. Wilson platform will move to EBSCO in January 2012. These include:
- Art Index Retrospective: 1929-1984
- Play Index
- Readers Guide Retrospective
- Art Full Text
- Education Full Text
- Education Index Retrospective
- Library Literature & Information Science Full Text (All campuses except UCD and UCI)
The PIDS have been changed to point to an interim page explaining about the change in vendor. At the beginning of January SCP will change the PIDs to point to EBSCO. (Campuses may have additional Wilson databases which are transitioning.)
ProQuest Transition Update
Many of the problems CDL identified with the new ProQuest platform are approaching resolution. The UC libraries will begin an overlap period in early 2012 with the old and new ProQuest platforms running simultaneously for several months. Stay tuned for more information.