CDL's Vision for Services Integration

Goals

One of the principles developed for the transition of CDL-hosted databases to external vendors is to concentrate UC and vendor efforts on the creation of robust and consistent user services across and between all information sources. To that end, the CDL will provide a system for integrating various electronic services available from both CDL-hosted and externally licensed resources.

The goals are to increase integration, provide a consistent user experience, use a standards-based approach for integrating services, and maintain UC's control over offering appropriate services.

Strategy

A key strategy is to supply patrons with links available from one information source to appropriate services and other sources. For this strategy we are concentrating on the implementation of Ex Libris's SFX product.

SFX offers a number of advantages in meeting our goals:

• Appropriate services: Users can be led to the most appropriate copy of an item available to them, as well as to other peripheral functions such as cited author searching or book reviews. UC can determine which services to offer rather than relying on individual providers' offerings.
• Standards-based: SFX accepts the emerging OpenURL standard to compute appropriate URLs for linking to other services.
• Shared support: Ex Libris provides updates to the database that maintains the metadata needed for links to vendors, publishers, or other services, and distributes any locally created metadata to other customers.
• Hierarchical relationships: SFX databases can be linked so that campuses could maintain information about their unique resources either in CDL's SFX implementation or in their own implementation.

Status

The CDL's SFX implementation, called UC-eLinks, is being tested currently with several of the new external database vendors to bring links to holdings, electronic journals, and Request to the same level available in the CDL-hosted database versions. The SFX team has developed principles to guide this first phase of implementation (see the UC-eLinks page.)

Future developments will include:

• Enhancements to SFX: Further experimentation and consultation with Ex Libris and other customers to identify and influence additional functionality. Two functions already identified are: 1) the ability to collect multiple citations and check for links all at once rather than by one item at a time; and 2) if there is only a single linking service, the ability to skip the SFX menu screen and proceed directly to the service.
• UC policies: As the campus libraries and technology approach readiness to incorporate locally selected resources, the CDL and the campuses will need to develop policies for how to implement hierarchical relationships between databases and servers and how to maintain the metadata.
• New services: The Tools and Services Working Group has been designated to advise on adding new services once the three basic services (i.e., links to holdings, links to full text, and document requesting) are stable and ubiquitous.

Scenarios

Following are some scenarios for CDL's vision for service integration.

Linking Now

Juana Gallegos* is a psychology major, writing a paper for her junior seminar class. Her topic is intrinsic motivation and learning. From a library session she attended last year, she remembers that the Current Contents database is a good general starting place. Her topic spans different disciplines such as education, psychology, and sociology, so she figures this would be a good place to start. Juana is excited to learn that there's a new service called UC-eLinks that will help with her research, and thank goodness! It's a service that looks the same when she uses a lot of different databases. Even though the citations are displayed differently in a lot of the databases, the way you get to the full text articles or other information is the same, using UC-eLinks.

She starts out looking in Current Contents via Ovid, and finds an interesting article by UC Berkeley professor Martin Covington entitled, "Intrinsic Versus Extrinsic Motivation: An Approach/Avoidance Reformulation." Clicking on the OpenLink (UC-eLinks) link, she is delighted when she sees "Full text available from Kluwer Academic in the UC-eLinks box". This means she can get the full text of the article while sitting in her sweats in her dorm room at 2:00 a.m.

Now, let's see what else there is. Hmmm. She finds another interesting article entitled, "Wanting to have vs. wanting to be: The effect of perceived instrumentality on goal orientation." It looks like she has to check the Melvyl/Periodicals catalog record to see if her library owns the journal. Darn it! She was hoping to find another full text version of an article without having to walk to the Ed-Psych library when it opens tomorrow. But wait! When she gets to the catalog record, it says her campus has an online version. The catalog links her into something called ProQuest. She pastes the title in ProQuest, and guess what? This article, in the British Journal of Psychology, appears just as it would in the journal with all kinds of nifty graphs and tables. These will impress her prof, for sure! She finds several more good articles, and finally one that she needs to get from the Library's Request Service. That's okay. It's easy to complete the form, and if it doesn't come in time, she has so many other great articles.

Next, Juana moves on to ERIC and Sociological Abstracts, but the interface looks different. This one is called Cambridge Scientific Abstracts. The librarian mentioned these databases in last week's library session. Hey, this looks good. She can search both the databases together.

This should save some time. And this is cool — there's that same UC-eLinks box. Nothing new to learn here...this part should be a breeze. Now comes the hard part — reading and synthesizing the articles, and writing the paper.

Linking: The Near Future

Jeff Guo* is working as a research apprentice for Professor Terry Machen at UC Berkeley in the undergraduate research apprentice program. The topic of his research is "inflammatory interactions between bacteria and lung airway epithelial cells." Before Jeff begins, he wants to find out what Dr. Machen has written himself. He takes a look in BIOSIS Previews with this new interface on Ovid and finds citations to more than 150 articles!

In addition to finding many of Dr. Machen's articles available in full text via UC-eLinks in Ovid, Jeff can also look up Professor Machen as a cited author in Web of Science using UC-eLinks. Now that he sees how much research Dr. Machen is involved in, and how important thisrResearch apprenticeship could be for his university experience, he thinks he'll make an appointment with a librarian. Good thing there's a link to "ask a question" on the UC-eLinks page. He'll see if he can set up an appointment this way.

Jeff sees another great feature on UC-eLinks. When he can't find a specific article in any of the sources available to him, he can also do a Google search right from the UC-eLinks window to see if the article is available via the web, like for the article, "Organelle pH studies using targeted avidin and fluorescein-biotin, and green fluorescent proteins". Wow! He found it on the web. What a great service!