Re: Cataloging EBSCO titles

["Kyle Banerjee" <banerjek@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> The University of Oregon Library is investigating whether and how we can
> load records in our OPAC for the fulltext titles available in the EBSCO
> databases.  EBSCO makes MARC records available for these titles on their
> FTP site.  Are any other III libraries using these records?
>
> I would appreciate receiving comments, etc. about your experiences.  What
> type of processing needs to be done to these records?  Can you use any of
> your existing load tables?  Do you have a procedure for deleting these
> records and periodically updating with new records from EBSCO?  We do not
> want to merge the print and electronic records. Did you encounter any
> unexpected problems?

    We used to have Ebsco records loaded but removed them because of
technical problems at Ebsco's end. Having said that, I'm hoping we'll be
able to reload them soon. As far as processing goes, the records are decent
and should require little if any processing. Depending on how your load
tables are set up, you might find that the control numbers get chewed up.
Maintenance is a snap. Just create a list and delete the old records before
inserting the new ones. If you belong to a consortium, it's a good idea to
make sure the records are only visible only in your local catalog unless the
other libraries are subscribed to the same databases.

    You be aware that Ebsco sometimes adds titles to their lists before they
appear in the database (my guess is that this is for marketing purposes).
Ebsco used to asterisk these titles in their lists, but now all they have is
a vague statement on their title list page alluding to this fact. These
titles usually appear within a couple months but this will cause problems
since people will find the links in your catalog but not the titles in
Ebsco. Also, if your ILL folks rely on your catalog, it can lead to refused
requests.

    On another usuability note, it's important to know that the links don't
lead to a browsable index. This is a limitation on Ebsco's part so you have
no control over that, but some people will be confused. Lastly, there are a
significant number of titles in Ebsco's database that don't appear in the
record lists. I haven't checked how many there are of these recently, but a
sweep of Academic Search Elite and Business Source Premier at the end of
August found 311 missing titles.

    The only other issue is that if a title appears in multiple databases
(very common occurrence since there is significant overlap across
databases), you will get multiple records. The only way you can get around
this problem is with some sort of custom written deduping mechanism.

kyle
___________________________________________________________________
Kyle Banerjee     banerjek@xxxxxxxxxx     Oregon State University
3769 Valley Library, Corvallis, OR 97331              (541)737-7262
              http://ucs.orst.edu/~banerjek/

--
This message was distributed through the Innovative Users Group INNOPAC list.
Private replies:  "Kyle Banerjee" <banerjek@xxxxxxxxxx>
Public replies:   INNOPAC@xxxxxxxxxx
Archives:  http://innopacusers.org/list/archives/