Linking Electronic Resources To Save Research Time

Abstract

Sifting through the mix of print and electronic resources of today’s hybrid academic libraries can be a daunting task. Although meant to make the process of finding information easier for users, today’s electronic resources often make research more difficult and baffling for many. One way to address this problem is by merging commercial online databases with other electronic resources, and with the library’s OPAC through a series of links and special features now available in most commercial databases. Although some large universities have the financial resources to afford such hot new linking services as Ex Libris’s SFX or Endeavor’s one-shot searching tool, Encompass, smaller academic libraries are often unable to afford such powerful utilities. That does not mean, however, that smaller academic libraries cannot still take advantage of some powerful linking technology. This paper will describe how the library at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, a small engineering and science college, utilized some of these features to link two full text databases to the library OPAC and directly to electronic journals. By adding MARC records containing links for each of the full text titles of each database into the OPAC, a loop can be created, whereby a non-full text search result in EBSCOhost could lead to the full text journal in ProQuest. The Internet often has made it necessary for librarians and library users to search through several databases, the library catalog, and sometimes lists of electronic journals to locate the full-text of an article found in another commercial database. In the last few years, new technology has added new services and features to online databases that librarians can use to connect these resources, thus almost eliminating the need to sift through countless resources to find one article. At the forefront of these advances are linking tools such as Ex Libris’s SFX and Endeavor’s Encompass. Although these services are very powerful, they are also very expensive, so expensive that many small colleges cannot afford them or justify their cost since these schools often tend to have smaller electronic collections. With all the new linking features that most commercial database services have today, smaller colleges need not be left out of today’s linking trends. Two of these features include the ability to add a local collection to a commercial database, the static approach, or linking the database directly to the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC), the dynamic approach. The library at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, a small engineering and science college in Indiana has utilized these features to connect its electronic resources to create a more dynamic and simpler searching process. The project was carried out primarily by myself with the assistance of our technical services librarian, Amy Harshbarger. Amy updated all our serials holdings in the catalog and added our electronic journals.