[Eril-l] Knowledgebase Review- Tips, Tricks, Research?

Wed Apr 10 14:09:26 PDT 2019

Thanks for the shout-out, Cindy. Unfortunately this tool will always and forever be limited to platforms/collections more monographic in nature.

The reason for this is there’s a vast difference between these tasks:

-          Here’s a bunch of URLs individual things we are supposed to have access to. Is there anything on the page you get to via that URL that indicates we have (or don’t have) access?
VERSUS

-          Here’s the URL for a journal and here’s the range of holdings we’re supposed to have access to and here’s some representation of how a script can automatically navigate to every article/item within that holding range to look for whether we have access to each individual article.

To Melissa’s point, the script described in that article has been updated to keep up with the types of changes you describe. We use this script on an ongoing basis. The current version is always available at:
https://github.com/UNC-Libraries/Access-Checker

It’s usually fairly simple for us to add logic for a product we don’t have locally, if you tell us exactly what that logic should be. The best way to initiate that is by opening an issue: https://github.com/UNC-Libraries/Access-Checker/issues/new

If you are code savvy yourself, we have also accepted and merged some pull requests to include new or updated logic (and other improvements).

-=-
Kristina M. Spurgin – Library Data Strategist
     Library Data Strategy & Services (LDSS)
             E-Resources & Serials Management, Davis Library 142a
                      University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
             CB#3938, Davis Library – Chapel Hill, NC 27514-8890
                           919-962-3825 – kspurgin at email.unc.edu<mailto:kspurgin at email.unc.edu>
                            https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1388-7061

From: Eril-l <eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org> On Behalf Of Melissa Belvadi
Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2019 2:47 PM
To: Harper, Cynthia <charper at vts.edu>
Cc: Alexander Dodd <adodd1 at loyola.edu>; eril-l at lists.eril-l.org
Subject: Re: [Eril-l] Knowledgebase Review- Tips, Tricks, Research?

That's a great lead, and I hadn't seen that before thanks. It is however, from 2014, and I wonder how many of those platforms have changed so that those pattern-strings in Table 1 would no longer work to identify access.

What we need is some kind of crowd-sourced page/database that everyone who does this kind of work could help keep updated as we figure out for our own use what to use.
I have no idea what might be the best way to try to start something like that - maybe a mini-wiki site?
Github? As a very occasional coder, I find Github incredibly unfriendly and intimidating, but maybe it's the right tool for this.

The task itself seems impossibly huge, but that's exactly when sharing the work across many in the profession would help make it feasible, and maybe we could even get the vendors to maintain their own entries in such a list.

I'm just really sick of discovering "missing" content by way of being embarrassed by a patron, often a very unhappy one, who finds the problem for us at their point of need.
As the old saying goes, this is no way to run a railroad! Or in our case, library.

Melissa Belvadi
Collections Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
mbelvadi at upei.ca<mailto:mbelvadi at upei.ca>  902-566-0581
my public calendar<http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=mbelvadi%40upei.ca&ctz=America/Halifax&mode=week>
Make an appointment<https://mbelvadi.youcanbook.me/> via YouCanBookMe

On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 3:22 PM Harper, Cynthia <charper at vts.edu<mailto:charper at vts.edu>> wrote:
You probably know about this article from UNC’s Kristina Spurgin https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/9684.  I realize it worked with ebooks, but possibly she has some article sites there too?

Cindy

From: Eril-l <eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org>> On Behalf Of Melissa Belvadi
Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2019 9:47 AM
To: Alexander Dodd <adodd1 at loyola.edu<mailto:adodd1 at loyola.edu>>
Cc: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>
Subject: Re: [Eril-l] Knowledgebase Review- Tips, Tricks, Research?

I am just this week wrapping up a CS student project (for which I'm the "client") that involves screenscraping publisher websites to determine if we in fact have access to the journal volumes that our knowledgebase says we have. I don't know if you intended your technical review of access to include that level of what I call "reality checking".

But if anyone else out there reading this has done that kind of screenscraping coding, I'd be interesting in sharing the brittle details publisher by publisher of what you look at on the publisher website to determine access. For instance, we've found that some publishers don't distinguish "you have access because we've made it free to everyone" (in a non-OA sense, like Nature, which could be revoked at any time) versus "you have access because you paid for it" in any way that we can tell via screenscraping.

Melissa Belvadi
Collections Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
mbelvadi at upei.ca<mailto:mbelvadi at upei.ca>  902-566-0581
my public calendar<http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=mbelvadi%40upei.ca&ctz=America/Halifax&mode=week>
Make an appointment<https://mbelvadi.youcanbook.me/> via YouCanBookMe

On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 10:12 AM Alexander Dodd <adodd1 at loyola.edu<mailto:adodd1 at loyola.edu>> wrote:
We’re doing mainly a technical review of access, with a little bit of research into the items as well, not in a cost/ usage data sense but in a “do we even know what this database is and why we have it” sense.

Alexander Dodd
Discovery & Electronic Resources Librarian

Loyola Notre Dame Library

200 Winston Avenue

Baltimore, MD 21212

t: (410) 617-6861

e: adodd1 at loyola.edu<mailto:adodd1 at loyola.edu>

www.lndl.org<http://www.lndl.org/>

From: Melissa Belvadi [mailto:mbelvadi at upei.ca<mailto:mbelvadi at upei.ca>]
Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2019 8:38 AM
To: Alexander Dodd <adodd1 at loyola.edu<mailto:adodd1 at loyola.edu>>
Cc: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>
Subject: Re: [Eril-l] Knowledgebase Review- Tips, Tricks, Research?

By "review of ... holdings" do you mean a technical review of access, e.g. making sure you have access to everything listed in your holdings? Or do you mean review in the acquisitions/collection development sense, e.g. looking at usage data and cost per use and such?

Melissa Belvadi
Collections Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
mbelvadi at upei.ca<mailto:mbelvadi at upei.ca>  902-566-0581
my public calendar<http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=mbelvadi%40upei.ca&ctz=America/Halifax&mode=week>
Make an appointment<https://mbelvadi.youcanbook.me/> via YouCanBookMe

On Tue, Apr 9, 2019 at 6:13 PM Alexander Dodd <adodd1 at loyola.edu<mailto:adodd1 at loyola.edu>> wrote:
Hi all,

I’m about to start a pretty in-depth review of our library’s e-resources knowledgebase holdings, and I’m curious if anyone has any research/ case studies they’ve seen that have looked helpful in going through such a deep project, or any personal tips that they wish they had known before diving into a similar project? I’m a little new to the e-resources field so I’m always looking for great research to jump off of.

Thanks,

Alexander Dodd
Discovery & Electronic Resources Librarian

Loyola Notre Dame Library

200 Winston Avenue

Baltimore, MD 21212

t: (410) 617-6861

e: adodd1 at loyola.edu<mailto:adodd1 at loyola.edu>

www.lndl.org<http://www.lndl.org/>

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