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Academic Works at the CUNY IT Conference

2015-12-07 / Leave a comment

The City University of New York’s 14th annual IT Conference was held at John Jay College on December 3rd and 4th. While a number of sessions addressed open access initiatives at CUNY, a few specifically highlighted the role of CUNY Academic Works as part of these efforts — from the preservation challenges presented by digital dissertations at the CUNY Graduate Center to the launch of a new open access journal devoted to the scholarship of teaching and learning in art history, Art History Pedagogy and Practice, that will be published in CUNY Academic Works.

On Friday afternoon, William Casari, Jill Cirasella, Miriam Deutch and Megan Wacha presented “Opening CUNY: Academic Works at Work.” This session introduced attendees to the repository initiative and discussed how opening content to the world impacts CUNY and its community, both local and global. In order to provide a sense of the range of content types collected by CUNY Academic Works, each speaker addressed a specific collection at their institution: dissertations at the Graduate Center, open educational resources (OERs) at Brooklyn College, the “Save Hostos” Gerald J. Meyer archival collection at Hostos Community College, and faculty research from across the entire City University of New York. Slides are available via CUNY Academic Works.

(left to right) William Casari, Megan Wacha, Jill Cirasella, and Miriam Deutch discuss Academic Works at the CUNY IT Conference.

Woah, we’re halfway there

2015-11-25 / Leave a comment

When CUNY Libraries embarked on the trail to a more open CUNY, the Office of Library Services communicated three actionable goals for the first 18 months:

In 6 months, 50% of institutions will have at least one collection in the repository
In 12 months, 100% of institutions will have at least one collection in the repository
In 18 months, CUNY Academic Works will have 15,000 items representing diverse content types and disciplines

In just eight months since the goals were announced at the Academic Works kick-off this March, 100% of institutions have at least one collection in the repository, and (WOAH!) we’re already halfway to the 18 month goal. There are now over 7,500 items in CUNY Academic Works.

OneSearch vs Aleph as an E-resource Source

2015-11-11 / Leave a comment

Last week’s post about link checking describes one of the ways that OLS is working on improving access to e-resources via OneSearch.

Another area of work regards e-resource records batchloaded to Aleph which are also available via the Primo Central Index (PCI). Because of the large number of duplicate records coming from Aleph, there are often problems determining availability correctly for these batchloaded records.

To avoid these problem, when OLS finds that PCI records are duplicated in Aleph, we mark the Aleph records in order to prevent transfer of these records to OneSearch.

Note: OLS is not removing records from Aleph, we are simply not using those records in OneSearch.

Additional benefits of this approach:

Efficiency. Duplication doesn’t only happen with PCI. Sometimes the same records are loaded to Aleph for multiple libraries. Any library using OneSearch as their discovery tool can choose to stop running these duplicate batchloads.
Faster turnaround with updates coming to PCI directly from the publisher.
Reduced potential for error and out-dated content.

How do I know which Aleph records are being blocked?

STA = PCI means we don’t need this record in OneSearch. These records can be found in Aleph via a CCL search (where “xx” is your library code):

wst=pci and wow=xx

What if there is more metadata in the Aleph record than in the PCI record?

Many PCI records come with searchable full-text — for example, in addition to the metadata, the entire text of an article could be searchable. Although it is possible that PCI records will contain less metadata than Aleph records, in such cases, we believe that the searchable full-text is a more than ample substitute. On the OLS Support Site, the following information is available:

How do we know if specific e-resources are available in PCI in order to decide what content is duplicated?

PCI makes activated collections searchable (aka “discoverable”). Full-text access for CUNY (aka “Full text Available” in OneSearch) happens because the resource is also activated in SFX. Many PCI collections can be searched for free, even when delivery of full-text is only available to subscribers. See the Primo, PCI, and SFX blog post for more information on this relationship.

At CUNY, we have activated all free-to-search PCI collections in our testing (“Sandbox”) version of OneSearch. When we want to check if specific e-resources are available via PCI, we can search for them in the Sandbox and, after the initial search result is displayed, we click on the “Include results without full text online” checkbox to include content to which we do not have full-text access.

Aleph e-resource records that are not found in PCI will continue to be sent to OneSearch.

Sandbox Caveat: The Sandbox does not include all CUNY content. It is restricted to 100K (local) records so it only contains a small percentage of our Aleph content.

Why does OneSearch sometimes say “No full-text” when there is a working link to full-text in the “Details” tab?

Distinguishing what is really available as full-text is challenging. To minimize user frustration, it is considered preferable to under-promise and over-deliver rather than to over-promise and under-deliver. In other words, the system errs on the side of false negatives (“No full-text” displayed even though full text is available), instead of false positives (“Full text available” displayed even though full text is not available).

For this reason, it can be helpful to remember that while “Full text available” is generally reliable, “No full-text” is less reliable. It is usually worthwhile to click on the “Details” tab of a “No full-text” result, just in case it contains some link that will get you to full-text.

Example: HathiTrust provides no indication of whether its content is open access or not, forcing its users to choose between false negatives and false positives. In response, we at CUNY have chosen to indicate that all HathiTrust content is “No full-text” even though many records will contain a link to full-text in the “Details” tab.

Are e-books showing up in Google Scholar? Many faculty will go to Google Scholar as their discovery tool and bypass the library.

E-resources activated in SFX show as available at CUNY in Google Scholar. This means that a side effect of this project is more availability information being shared with Google Scholar, inadvertently leading to a better user experience in Google Scholar. Please be aware, however, that Google Scholar shares little about how and where it gets the information it provides.

What are e-resources?

“E-resources” refers to any type of content that is available in electronic or digital form. This includes articles, books, videos, and more.

Looking for Link Errors in Aleph Catalog Records

2015-11-06 / Leave a comment

The Office of Library Services is pleased to report that we have completed a thorough review of 856 (URL) fields in our catalog. On Thursday, November 5, we emailed the Cataloging Committee members explaining how to access their school’s error list in the Aleph task manager and providing details about the results.

Project Goals

a school-specific report listing all the problem fields
a method for temporarily removing these broken URLs from OneSearch
an easy method for catalogers to update Aleph and OneSearch once the 856 fields are corrected
an easy method for catalogers to obtain updated lists of any remaining broken 856 fields

To that end, suspect 856s fields have been marked in the Aleph cataloging record with an 856 sub-field ($zBroken Link). For example:

85641$ahttp://state.tn.us/correction$zBroken Link

Until the link is fixed and the subfield is removed, the URL will not appear in OneSearch.

When the cataloger corrects the link in the 856 field, they will also remove the Broken Link subfield and, later that day or the next day (depending on the time of the update), the link will reappear in OneSearch.

While we have provided a list of broken links for each campus, any Aleph power user can easily get an updated list via an Aleph CCL (Common Command Language) search. For example, this search will output all broken links owned by CUNY Central (OWN=AL):

WUR="broken link" AND WOW=AL

Recommendations

To help you get started, we are recommending that catalogers prioritize the error list in the following way?s

Troubleshoot e-resource-only records first (before mixed print+electronic). If these don’t work, the records have no reason to exist.
Identify 856s in old records (government docs and books) that point to non-full-text content (like table of contents). Consider removing those without assessment.
Identify 856s for online versions of print material. Update if possible, otherwise remove the links (PURLs often don’t work).

Additional Notes

In September, we wrote about new error checks for the 856 field that had been added in the Aleph GUI. These error checks allow the cataloger to open a record, press CTRL-U (Check Record), and get an error report showing the type of error. Clicking on that error will take them directly to the problematic 856 field.

That September blog entry also lists all the MARC fields which can contain a URL. At the beginning of this project, we reviewed the content of all those other URL fields (505, 506, etc) and found that their use was extremely rare at CUNY. For that reason, we only ran this URL checking process on 856 fields.

Since we have added the GUI-based URL checks, we do not anticipate running this process more than once a year.

Working with the Aleph Task Manager and Reports

2015-10-16 / Leave a comment

The Task Manager is the Aleph client user’s only window into back-end Aleph server processes. It is the only visual utility where the Aleph users can view, obtain, and manipulate reports and other task files, whether produced periodically or on-demand. It allows users to find reports/files saved on the Aleph server’s print directory for viewing, printing/emailing (manually or automatically), or downloading to any desired local directory for backup and/or future processing.

After the Aleph 21 update, the Task Manager utility was significantly revamped in terms of functionality, accessibility, and ease of use. Getting familiarized with the Task Manager is very important for cataloging and circulation staff, but it is equally useful for information services staff as it would allow them to obtain all kinds of information access statistics files.

For more information on how to work with the Aleph Task Manager utility and reports, please read the Task Manager and Files page available on the OLS Support Site.

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