Bulliard, C

Chaney, Eliane

Christiansen, C

CERN Document Server

European Laboratory for Particle PhysicsCERN - GenevaCERN-AS-99-00324th March 1999The electronic journal service at CERN,a first evaluation:User access interfaces and user awarenessEliane CHANEYCatherine BULLIARDCaroline CHRISTIANSENCERN Scientific Information Service1Eliane CHANEY, Catherine BULLIARD, Caroline CHRISTIANSENCERN European Laboratory for Particle Physics, GenevaThe electronic journal service at CERN,a first evaluation:User access interfaces and user awarenessIntroductionCERN is the European Laboratory for Particle Physics located in Geneva.It provides scientific research facilities to some 3000 permanent staffand 6500 visiting scientists, engineers or technicians from all over theworld, who come to explore and study the atom.These scientists exchange theories and participate in large experiments.The development of their work and the results are regularly described inscientific articles. These are submitted as preprints to our server andsubsequently to the now famous Los Alamos preprints electronic archives.In 1997, some 1800 CERN articles were published in journals or conferenceproceedings.Towards a journal desktop servicePreprints and printed journal articles are complementary publishingoutlets for authors. But while in a preprint archive it takes a matter ofhours from submitting an article to its publication on the Web,publishing the same article in a printed journal may take months. Thesedelays are less with electronic publishing. And every day new readers,well used to online technologies, discover the advantages of a digitallibrary environment, working with full-text preprints and journalcollections available on their desktop. Users value the reliability andstability of an integrated service and the time saving.But there is still the problem for users that journals put on theInternet are spread over different publishers’ web sites. The library atCERN has recognised the need to provide effortless access to ourelectronic journals collection. This meant that we need to develop,integrate and adapt specific online interfaces for these documents.2Present collectionsPresently, besides the paper collection which includes some 480scientific titles, we offer access to 260 full-text online journals. Dueto repeated acquisition budget reductions and regular subscription priceincreases, we have had to limit our online journal acquisitions withinthe printed subscriptions allocation. (see also: Bulletin desbibliothèques de France; 44(2), 1999, pp. 27-32)As a consequence, titles have been selected when they are:- available at the same or lower price than the paper version ;- accessible without charge as part of the paper subscription ;- acquired through a license between a publisher, Springer, and aconsortium of Swiss academic and research libraries ;- available free of charge on the Internet and considered of scientificinterest for our community.We also point to some 200 online tables of contents which are availablefree of charge to us.For each new title, we always test the service and the accessreliability. We have a strong preference for IP-based access control forthe whole site. Titles that require personal ID and passwords access areignored.The resulting collection can be retrieved from our OPAC catalogue or fromdedicated electronic journals web screens described below.ExpectationsThe main benefits for the library expected from electronic journals arethe savings on processing time and of storage space, and hopefully in thefuture reduced or stabilised costs. We like to cite as an interestingmodel, a new journal in our field: « JHEP, Journal of high energyphysics », produced at SISSA (Trieste), and published by the ItalianPhysical Society. This title is primarily an electronic journal, peer-reviewed, and accessible without charge on the Internet. Articles areadded as they become available and later a ‘printed archive’ volume ispublished on paper and distributed on subscription at a reasonable cost.Physicists support and encourage this new publication, as much for itsquality as for the distribution speed of the full text publishedarticles.3Towards a better accessAt present, we feel that we are providing a useful service, and we havethe support of our community, but as explained further in this article,we need a better understanding of readers’ attitude towards electronicresources.The future should bring improvements. Currently there are a large varietyof publication and distribution patterns for electronic journals. And themanagement and distribution methods of electronic journals arecumbersome, but we hope that in the future publishers will harmonisetheir services as they have done with printed editions. We also hope forthe organisation of electronic archives by national or internationalinstitutions. We believe these two developments should enable librariesto provide a more satisfactory integrated service for electronicresources.4CataloguingAt the present time the CERN Library runs Aleph 330 documentary softwarewith its in-house developed MARC format. The cataloguing rules are basedon ISBD. By the year 2000 the Library will have installed the new Aleph500 version and will convert its data into the USMARC format. The anglo-american cataloguing rules (AACR2) will then be adopted, along with theISBD(ER) for the electronic resources. OCLC responded to the need for afocused cataloguing treatment of electronic resources by integratingdiscussion of Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2d ed. (AACR2), theUSMARC fields, and the International Standard Bibliographic Description(ISBD(ER))1.Cataloguing developments of the electronic journalsWhen the Library catalogued its first electronic journals in 1996, fewguidelines or standards were available. Our initial choices have beenconfirmed or have evolved according to the recommendations of the mainbibliographic institutions, namely the Library of Congress and OCLC.The Library decided to allocate a proper bibliographic record to eachelectronic journal. CONSER suggests either one record with mention of theexistence of the online format in the paper journal bibliographic record,or two bibliographic records, referring respectively to the printed andelectronic editions. The Library has chosen the second method, whichpresents various advantages.Having a bibliographic record specific to each format means that inaddition to the bibliographic data, some useful hypertext links can beput on the Web OPAC, enabling navigation between both versions. Having aseparate record makes it possible to create lists for the Webautomatically. Also, the printed and online electronic collectioncatalogues can be easily differentiated when produced.Furthermore in our integrated system the existence of separate recordsfor e-versions allows us to manage e-journal  subscriptions separatelyand easily.                        1Olson, Nancy B., Ed. Cataloging Internet Resources: A Manual andPractical Guide. 2d ed. Dublin, OH: OCLC Online Computer Library Center,Inc., 1997 [http://www.purl.org/oclc/cataloging-internet]5Location and electronic accessFour new fields have been introduced in our library catalogue record inorder to describe the characteristics of the electronic resourcesavailable on the Internet.The first added field is a sort of semaphore signal that indicates eitherthat access is restricted to the CERN Intranet or that the full text isfreely available on the Internet. A second added field is dedicated tothe Uniform Resource Locator (URL), together with a standardised notethat qualifies the resource type: i.e. online version of a printedjournals, or an electronic only journal. A third field links bothversions of a periodical with their system number.Finally a fourth new field defines the electronic services the publisheroffers free of charge: tables of contents, abstracts, selected articles.The field is structured to contain the URL, to describe the service type,to give it a code for retrieval purposes, as well as to indicate its timespan.Mining for data, and maintaining its validity, is time-consuming but isproving worthwhile for the users.A medium level of cataloguing is carried out by our library. The journalbibliographic record provides the electronic format availability, theholding information, or a bibliographic change. Each of these dataachieves the complete description of the electronic resource and supportsthe user interfaces features.6Interface to electronic journals’ collectionReaders can access full text articles or online tables of contentsin different ways.One point of access is through the OPAC, i.e. the GUI to thecatalogue. This interface has been designed in-house, withbibliographic records offering links to the electronic documents.The OPAC mostly serves the needs for searching.For browsing, we have developed two lists. In the first the titlesare ordered alphabetically, with clear mention of documents withrestricted access. For each title with a corresponding paperversion, a link to the local holdings is indicated. The titleswith full text availability have been graphically distinguishedfrom the titles with tables of content access. What is specialabout the alphabetical list is its automated production. The listis generated via a program that queries the catalogue andretrieves all titles with online features. It produces and formatsthe html files, which are then put online. This development hasconsiderably reduced the time needed to maintain the list, whichwas previously done manually. The sine qua non to its productionis correct cataloguing.The list by subject allows the reader to choose a specific subjectcategory and to browse the journals’ list under that heading. Thelinks lead to the bibliographic records in the OPAC, from whereaccess to the document is possible.Another interface to electronic journals, called GO DIRECT, is aWeb form that retrieves requested articles on the fly if thereader has the precise reference (i.e. title, year, volume andpage number). The engine avoids unnecessary navigation throughpublishers’ web pages. It was invented and launched by a physicistat our institute. He felt it was necessary to have a search toolthat could speed up the access to full text articles. The facilityoffered by GO DIRECT corresponds well to our users’ needs: becausein fact they usually do have precise references. The Go Direct7script constructs a URL from the citation the user supplies.Because the publishers use URLs based on citations it is possiblefor the script to reliably predict the correct URL from thecitation.This understanding of the logical construction of URLs is alsowidely used to insert a link in the OPAC for preprints to theelectronically published version of a scientific article. Themethod permits immediate access to both the preprint and thepublished versions of the article.Promotion and evaluation of the serviceOne of the main goals of the library service is to circulateinformation on the availability of new services and products toreaders.The Library is very keen to promote the use of electronicjournals: for example by awareness raising advertisementcampaigns. There are many reasons for this. One is our view ofelectronic journal access as a service, for everybody, and whichhas to be successful, i.e. used. The electronic journal gatewaysdescribed above serve first the readers who are already familiarwith online journals and then should persuade the others to accessjournals from their desktop. The whole community should experiencethe facilities offered by the electronic medium.Another reason to develop this service relates to foreseen costsavings.Finally, we believe that electronic journals are to be animportant step towards the digital library, reducing the amount ofpaper that needs to be stored in the library, and making availablediverse information sources.After promotion the next step in the development of the service isproper evaluation. It is important for us to measure theacceptance of electronic journals by our readers and the usage ofour collection.8At first, observation of attitudes towards electronic journals hasbeen primarily informal at the information desk in the Library.Then, we decided we needed a user survey. On the one hand, we haveanalysed the connections to the web pages dedicated to electronicjournals. This quantitative data has informed us about the extentof the usage. More than 35% of the population on the site seem tohave visited the pages within a period of 4 months. 30% of theseconnections are by regular readers.On the other hand, an online questionnaire was launched, requiringthe opinions of both users and non-users of electronic journals.We considered the data as qualitative, because of the low responserate. The analysis of the questionnaire’s data has established thehigh degree of satisfaction of the users with electronic journalsand the service provided by the Library as well as the willingnessof the non-users to adopt new reading habits.In the future, we hope that publishers will collaborate in thetask of measuring the usage of electronic collections of journals.At the moment, we have only been able to collect data on theglobal usage of our collection and had to rely on in-house skilledmethods used in our recent survey. But publishers, we think, areable to, and should provide detailed figures about the usage ofindividual titles.When carrying out our survey, we contacted our publishers in orderto obtain statistics. The result of our enquiry established thatthey are not yet organised to answer detailed questions. In thefuture we hope to get data in the form of log files in a standardformat or at minimum, simply the willingness to collaborate inusage analysis.9Further readingChaney, E.; Bulliard, C.; Christiansen, C.; Cressent, J.-P. Unebibliothèque de recherche face à l’édition électronique: l’exemple duCERN, in: Bulletin des bibliothèques de France, 44(2), 1999, pp. 27-32.Le Coadic, Y. F. Le besoin d'information: formulation, négociation,diagnostic. Paris: ADBS, 1998 (Collection Sciences de l'information,série Etudes et techniques).Peterson Bishop, A. Measuring access, use, and success in digitallibraries, in: The Journal of electronic publishing [Online], 4(2), 1998.http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-02/bishop.htmlPettenati, C. What is a virtual library?, in: ELAG, 17th Library SystemSeminar, Graz, 14-16 April 1993, pp. 145-163._____________________________________________________________URLsCERN Scientific Information Service homepagehttp://wwwas.cern.ch/library/What is the APS link manager?http://publish.aps.org/linkfaq.html10Figures_____________________________________________________________Fig.1 E-journals homepage:http://wwwas.cern.ch/library/electronic_journals/ej.html_____________________________________________________________Fig.2 OPAC screens of the electronic and the printed editionsof Classical and quantum gravity:2.1http://weblib.cern.ch/cgi-bin/showfull?uid=0571916_24074&base=CERCER&sysnb=02360522.2http://weblib.cern.ch/cgi-bin/showfull?uid=0571916_24074&base=CERCER&sysnb=144241_____________________________________________________________Fig.3 GO Direct:http://wwwas.cern.ch/library/electronic_journals/from_ref_to_text_AE.htmlPlease fill in the form with following example:Electronic letters online, volume 35, 1999, page 1_____________________________________________________________Fig.4 OPAC information of a preprint with both access to theoriginal full text document and to the published version:ETHZ-IPP-PR-97-01 . (hep-ex/9705004) . Towards a Precise PartonLuminosity Determination at the CERN LHC . by Dittmar, M ; Pauss, F ;Zürcher, D ; (14 p) . 1997 . Publ. Ref.: Phys. Rev., D : 56 (1997) 117284-7290 - Published version - Access to fulltext documentMore information – Mark document

The electronic journal service at CERN, a first evaluation: user access interfaces and user awareness

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