Not sure if I’ve mentioned it here, but my library uses SerialsSolutions for our A-Z journal list, OpenURL linking, and ERMS. I’ve been putting a great deal of effort into the ERMS over the past few years, getting license, cost, and use data in so that we can use this tool for both discovery and assessment. Aside from making the page look pretty much like our library website, we haven’t done much to enhance the display.
Recently (as in, yesterday) my colleague Dani Roach over at the University of St. Thomas shared with me an enhancement they implemented using the “public notes” for a journal title. They have icons that indicate whether there is an RSS feed for the contents and whether the journal is peer reviewed (according to Ulrichs). The icon for the RSS feed is also a link to the feed itself. This is what you see when you search for the Journal of Biological Chemistry, for example.
Much like the work I’m doing to pull together helpful information on the back-end about the resources from a variety of sources, this pulls in information that would be tremendously useful for students and faculty researchers, I think.
However, I have a feeling this would take quite a bit of time to gather up the information and add it to the records. Normally I would leap in with both feet and just do it, but in the effort to be more responsible, I’m going to talk with the reference librarians first. But, I wanted to share this with you all because I think it’s a wonderful libhack that anyone should consider doing, regardless of which ERMS they have.
Interesting and worrh investigating. Do you know if the hack the U of St. Thomas did would require subscription to other Serials Solutions services as well? My library only subscribe to the A-Z journal list.
We both have the Resource Manager product, so it’s possible that’s where it’s coming from. Look up a title in the Client Center and see if Public Note is one of the options in the tree below Title Details.
OK. Thanks for the pointers.
So did your friend Dani add the RSS feed and peer-review status info into the ERMS item by item, one at a time? Or is there some service in the ERMS that can use to get that info and populate it into the public notes field? We’ve only got the A-Z product from Serials Solutions (we use SFX for our link resolver and we have no ERMS), so some of this work you mention is all a bit theoretical to me, as I’ve not seen an ERMS up close and personal.
The RSS feed information is getting pulled from OCLC’s xISSN web service. I don’t know but would guess that if Ulrich’s has a similar developer interface, the peer reviewed status is being added that way. The work was done by their web developer (Ben Durrant), so I’d recommend contacting him for the details on how this information was added to each title.