And its true that if you get the article metadata directly from the publishers,
you avoid the issues with duplication that we have with the secondary databases
who all re-format and add data to each record they receive. However, I would
guess this requires many more negotiations (many more publishers) than
dealing with the A&I vendors.
Miriam
LANL
On 7/2/10 6:57 AM, "Laurence Lockton" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Eric is right, a few European institutions have been doing this for
several years. At the University of Bath we've been using ELIN
http://elin.lub.lu.se/elinInfo, which Lund University in Sweden had been
operating since 2001 (until recently - it's now been effectively spun
off.) This is also what underlies the DOAJ site http://www.doaj.org/
It seems to me that there are two approaches to building these
aggregated indexes:
(1) load whole databases (mostly A&I) and catalogues, as an
alternative to federated search, and
(2) collect article-level metadata, mostly from primary publishers, to
build an index of the library's e-journals collection, then possibly add
the "print catalogue."
LANL sounds like it's taken the first approach; ELIN and Journal TOCs
http://www.journaltocs.hw.ac.uk/ are based on the second. The approach
taken by the commercial vendors is somewhat blurred between the two, but
I would suggest that EBSCO Discovery Service and OCLC WorldCat Local are
broadly based on the first approach and Serials Solutions Summon and Ex
Libris Primo Central are more focussed on the second. I think this is an
important consideration for anyone selecting a service, or contemplating
building their own.
Laurence Lockton
University of Bath
UK
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