Best Practices for Presentation of E‐Journals

Abstract

The publishers and providers of e‐journals take great pride in the diverse designs of their websites. Yet how these websites present, identify, and link together the publications that they display can make the end‐user task of discov‐ ering articles and accessing them easy, frustrating, or completely fruitless. In 2010, NISO established a workgroup to draft recommended practice guidelines for the presentation and identification of e‐journals (PIE‐J) to help publishers ensure that e‐journal content can be reliably discovered, cited, and accessed by users over time. The recommended practice guidelines emphasize the need to retain the original title and citation information across all journal formats and provide constructive advice to help with the presentation of born‐digital content as well as to support the contin‐ ued digitization of content from journals originally published only in print. The guidelines will be presented to at‐ tendees of this session, along with information on how the guidelines were drafted and how the guidelines relate to other standards and best practices. In an article in Information Standards Quarterly pub‐ lished in spring 2009, Reynolds and Hepfer describe a scenario in which a frustrated undergraduate work‐ ing on a writing assignment faces various challenges in her search for the full text of a specific article start‐ ing with a standard, abbreviated citation to that arti‐ cle. A great deal of the difficulty that the fictional student encounters stems from a lack of standardiza‐ tion in the way in which e‐journals are presented. Various policies and practices have contributed to creating a sometimes overwhelmingly complex online environment for journal content. Since 1971, most U.S. libraries have followed cataloging rules that require each significantly changed title of a jour‐ nal to be cataloged as a separate record; the result is that libraries effectively consider a changed title to have become a new journal for identification, con‐ trol, and inventory purposes. Often the new title has a different ISSN from the old title. Editors may feel content is more marketable if it is presented under the current journal title, and may not reference his‐ torical titles. Product managers and website design‐ ers may seek a simpler and more elegant arrange‐ ment than breaking the content into the various pieces that place it under (multiple) changed titles. Not all content providers either think to consult li‐ brarians or employ librarians to advise on content presentation. In addition to problems with presentation of journal content on the web for readers, there are also diffi‐ culties with link resolvers used by academic and other institutions to connect users with content. Typically, these link resolvers help guide readers to journal articles by using the metadata in Open URLs (ANSI/NISO Z39.88). If the source citation (as repre‐ sented by OpenURL metadata) and the knowledge‐ base identify the same content with different journal titles and ISSN, then the corresponding target links will not be offered to the user. Content that a library has paid for will not be served to a researcher, even though that content has been licensed and should be available to its users. Further, even when guided to the appropriate content by the link resolver, re‐ searchers may be confused by seeing one title in a reference and landing on a page that appears to be an entirely different title. In order to provide publishers and other content providers with practical guidance, the National In‐ formation Standards Organization (NISO) convened a working group on Recommended Practices for the Presentation and Identification of E‐Journals (PIE‐J). PIE‐J is jointly headed by Bob Boissy, Director, Net‐ work Sales, Springer (Robert.Boissy@springer.com)