Transcript Building Flexibility and Accountability in Electronic Resources

Building Flexibility in
Electronic Resource
Management
Gerald Steeman and Jane Wagner
NASA Langley Research Center
InfoToday 2002, New York, NY
May 16, 2002
Where is NASA Langley?
What Do Folks at Langley Do?
• Aeronautics
Caption: 3%-Scale BWB-LSV Langley 14x22 Wind Tunnel Model.
What Do Folks at Langley Do?
• Earth Science
Image of water vapor from Geostationary
Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)
What Do Folks at Langley Do?
• Space Technology
A Langley-based team of researchers successfully completed the 77day aerobraking phase of the Mars Odyssey mission
What Do Folks at Langley Do?
• Structures and Materials
Astronaut Linda M. Godwin, trains with the Mir Environmental Effects
Payload (MEEP) in a NASA Langley Research Center clean room.
What Do Folks at Langley Do?
• Special Research Projects
Langley scientists use a non-invasive instrument to determine
the relative humidity inside the encasement of the U.S.
Constitution for the National Archives.
To the Business at Hand…
Barrel jousting at
the 1929 Langley
Laboratory annual
picnic
Early Management of
Electronic Journals at Langley
• The medium drove the process early on
– Web people ended up doing serials and
cataloging functions
– Web lists of journals continually out-ofdate
– 856s started to “crop up” in the catalog
– Statistics on use spotty, at best
Use the Catalog!
• Heeded Marilyn Geller advice @ 1995
– treat electronic journals no differently than
conventional ones
• Made catalog the authoritative source
for maintaining all electronic journal
information:
– URLs (856s), Holdings, “access claiming”
POCs, and administrative user information
Really Use the Catalog!
• Developed catalog tagging and scripts to
pull cataloged title and URL info into
Web pages
• Set up pre-defined search screens in
catalog focused on electronic resources
• Created and modified open-source
scripts for collecting statistics and link
checking
Coding MARC Records
• The catalogers agreed on certain subfields not
previously used in the 856 and the local notes fields.
These subfields are hidden from public display.
• The 856 was coded so the script creating an external
page could select the right URL.
Coding Continued
• The local notes fields for each NASA
center were coded with type and subject
flags.
• We are using 11-14 subject flags and 7
type flags to create targeted lists.
Within the Catalog
• We can create predefined searches within
our Webcat interface, so users can see the
targeted resources.
• Note that subject lists come from the subject
codes in the local notes field, not from the
normal subject fields such as the 650. We
wanted to control what resources appeared
in these lists.
Electronic Resource Lists
Available in WebCat as Predefined Searches
WebCat Electronic Resource
Subject List
External Web Pages
• With shell and Perl scripts, we can also pull
these records out of the catalog and create
external web pages. These pages are another
way to highlight selected electronic resources
for users. Each title has a link back to the
catalog record as well as a link to the
resource.
• The pages are automatically updated weekly
by a cron job. Manual maintenance is
required only if the boilerplate text or search
criteria change.
Electronic Journal Web Page
Research
Database
Web Page
Gathering Statistics
• Both the WebCat URLs and the URLs on our
external electronic resource web pages call a
CGI script which logs usage and redirects to
the title.
• We are able to get counts for usage by title
and by NASA center, not only for the targeted
electronic resources but for all of our URLs.
• We are developing new scripts to further
break down the usage information; this should
help us decide which subscriptions to
continue.
Elsevier vs. Langley script stats
September-01
Title (Elsevier Titles in BOLD)
Acta astronautica.
Advances in space research : the official journal of the
Committee on Space Research (COSPAR).
Aerospace science and technology.
Aircraft design.
Aircraft engineering and aerospace technology.
Applied acoustics. Acoustique appliquâe. Angewandte
Akustik.
Automatica : the journal of IFAC, the International
Federation of Automatic Control.
Composite structures.
Composites science and technology.
Composites. Part A, Applied science and
manufacturing.
Composites. Part B, Engineering.
Computational mechanics.
Computers & structures.
Engineering analysis with boundary elements.
38
# of sessions logged via
CGI scripts
Total
TL
Elsevier
Total
Elsevier
Session Download Sessions Downloads
3
25
38
80
80
2
8
5
4
6
13
10
n/a
18
50
39
28
49
49
83
n/a
3
0
15
9
3
6
8
7
78
33
21
19
25
57
191
164
7
1
1
0
0
11
14
n/a
4
0
15
11
30
26
9
125
67
n/a
68
10
# of downloaded articles
per Elsevier
Conclusions
• Limitations
– You only get what your catalog has
– Added risk in customizing vendor system
– Not as flexible as typical SQL database solutions
• Benefits
– One source published many ways
– Capitalizes on the work already established in the catalog
– Creates interaction between web pages and catalog
• Other Considerations
– Serials Solutions™
– Serials vendors