1. Know Your Collections! Rebuilding a Discovery Service and an Open URL Resolver
Judith Nagata, Electronic Resources Librarian
Coastal Carolina University
Charleston Library Conference
November 4, 2016, 11:35am

2. About the university and library
10,000 FTE (undergraduate and masters)
$900,000 electronic collections budget
4 technical services librarians ; 3 technical services support staff
High staff turnover in the past few years.
EBSCO’s Discovery and Open URL resolver (Full Text Finder)
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3. There are problems with Discovery and Open URL Resolver (Journals A-Z)
after an upgrade!

4. Planning the Project Gather more data on problems
Consult with the vendor (many times)
Triage to manage the project. What will not be included? What is essential?
Plan the timing of the actual rebuilding (Not during Spring Term!)
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5. Sort problems into categories
Discovery
Bad citations
Does not connect resources
Circular citations link back to citation
Open URL resolver (Journals A-Z)
Bad holdings
Bad links to ebooks and streaming media
Does not launch ILL form
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6. Understanding Discovery Service with Open URL Resolver (Publication Finder)

8. Decision: Pull apart the linked Discovery
and Open URL Resolver
Discovery and Open URL Resolver are sharing data because they are linked together.
Pull the two services apart to find the problems with each.
Note: We also use EBSCO as our journal subscription service and decided to unlink that service from our discovery and open URL resolver as well.

9. Fixing the Central Index
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10. Fixing the Central Index
Prioritize Index Collections for CCU
Choose journal articles, ebooks and streaming video as most important citations / indexes to include
Choose to not include specialty business databases (e.g. Mergent), archival collections , or specialty databases (e.g. ArtSTOR).

11. Fixing the Central Index
Which databases, vendors, etc. include bad metadata?
Example:
Search in Discovery: “Why Chinese mothers are superior”
Results: Two (2) of the same article: one from the Straights Times (Singapore) with an incorrect citation (vendor #1: NewsBank) and one from the Wall Street Journal with a correct citation (vendor #2: EBSCO).
Solution: After multiple examples, we discovered that the citation metadata for the first vendor is consistently incorrect.

12. Fixing the Central Index
Create a list of databases, vendors, collections, and platforms.
Remove those that contain bad citation metadata.

13. Fixing the Knowledgebase
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14. Fixing the Knowledgebase
Prioritize full text collections, media collections, and ebook collections.
Journal packages
Aggregator collections
Ebook collections purchased
Ebook collections rented
Streaming media collections

15. Fixing the Knowledgebase
CCU links to ebooks and streaming media via catalog records.

16. Fixing the Knowledgebase
Create lists of linking problems for both Journals A-Z and open URL linking.
Examples
Looked for Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research in Journals A-Z. There are 4 results. Some of the Ovid/LWW links work and others do not.
In Discovery results there are links to full text from ISI Web of Science. Web of Science is an index without full text. We are in a circular pattern: citation to citation.

17. Fixing the Knowledgebase
Add, remove, and adjust all collections activated in your Knowledgebase to match your list.
Remove collections with a significant % of bad links (e.g. open access).

18. Toward the End The Central Index and Knowledgebase have been rebuilt.
Clean citations and correct full text options are now available and linking together.
This is a baseline. Additional databases (citation) and formats can be tested and added later.

19. Other Considerations This presentation does not include:
Fixes to the discovery and open URL resolver interfaces (e.g. search defaults, displays of results).
Fixes to discovery widgets.
Clean up of journal title lists matching to licenses. Separating purchases from rentals, cleaning up short runs, etc.

20. Rebuild for Discovery and Open URL Resolver was finished
by the beginning of Fall Term 2016.
Knowing Our Collections for both the Central Index and the Knowledgebase allowed us to Roll with the Times!
Thank you.
Judith Nagata
Electronic Resources Librarian
Coastal Carolina University