resources, sfx link resolver

Problems with Safari Books Online

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Unfortunately, we noticed several problems with accessing the Safari Tech Books collection over the last days:

  1. The MPG/SFX server sometimes fails to redirect requests to the correct entry page, see example.
    Solution: Prefer the link offered by the "MPG eBook Index" as this seems to work much more reliable.
     
  2. Not all book content loads correctly if you select a particular book section from the table of content, see example.
    Solution: Try to switch to the HTML view instead by clicking the new icon from the Safari tool bar, i.e.
    safari tool bar

Note: We and the Safari support are aware of these problems and hope to solve them soon!

sfx link resolver

MPG/SFX: Unexpected outage solved

Today, the MPG/SFX server was not available from 12 a.m. to 3 p.m., due to a crash of the SFX database. Meanwhile our hosting partner managed to restore the database from the backfile and restarted the service successfully.

We are sorry for the inconvenience (and will try our best to get rid of all the bad karma

vLib portal

vLib upgrade planned for Wed 16-09-09

We are planning to upgrade our portal software to MetaLib version 4.3.

Unfortunately, a downtime of several hours will be inevitable, consequently vLib is likely to be unavailable between 08:00 and 12:00 a.m. that day.

We would like to apologize in advance for any inconvenience.

UPDATE (16 September, 12:19): Installation process delayed. Services continue to be unavailable.

UPDATE (16 September, 15:45): Services available again.

vLib portal

Extended metasearches enabled in vLib

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To enable extended metasearches, and thus to emphasize the big asset of metasearching (which is covering the widest possible range of information sources in the course of carrying out a single search) the number of resources searchable simultaneously via vLib has been increased significantly.

This enables creating overall search interfaces such as, for example, a search across all MPG Library Catalogs available at

http://vlib.mpg.de/start?module=metasearch&stype=locate&type=MPG%20Library%20Catalog

which may be useful to locate a needle in a haystack.

Of course, users will be deciding whether the usability of huge metasearch interfaces is acceptable. Hence we are curious to have some feedback.

sfx link resolver, tools

Some appetite for Table of Contents feeds?

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Over the last years, many academic publishers introduced web syndication formats like RSS and Atom to provide their users with Table of Contents (TOC) alerting services. Due to the wide adoption of feed formats in the web, this trend promotes metadata reuse in many ways:

  1. Individual users may subscribe to TOC feeds in a reader client to receive information about recent publications. They can also apply web tools (like xfruits) to aggregate feeds and convert them to another message format.
  2. Website owners may use syndication services to dynamically integrate article information into their applications. For an example, check the homepage of the National Library of Health Sciences at the University of Helsinki (FeedNavigator boxes).

How to discover TOC feeds without searching each publisher’s homepage one after another? The ticTOCs project collected more than 12,000 journal feeds from over 400 publishers and offers an intuitive web interface on the top. In addition, the project team was broad-minded enough to share the source data with the community in order to ensure that journal feeds "osmose" into as many environments as possible. This strategy proved to be successful: the ticTOCs data is reused by numerous systems, including OCLC’s xISSN service, a Google application as well as library catalogs at Jönköping University or Wageningen UR …

… and finally we managed to load the data into the MPG/SFX link resolver as well, see http://tinyurl.sfx.mpg.de/q4r3 for an example:

screen shot of sfx menu

However, one question remains: What will happen to the ticTOCs service now – after project end? Ed Pentz announced in the CrossRef Quarterly from May 2009 that "CrossRef is now investigating hosting the service on an ongoing basis", see version cached by Google. Currently, the ticTOCs homepage lacks an option to report problems or corrections, so the service manly relies on harvesting publisher websites. Will this be enough to keep the service up-to-date and unambiguous?

sfx link resolver

New in MPG/SFX: "View this record in Web of Science"

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Wouldn’t it be nice if the MPG/SFX service menu for a specific journal article includes a link to the corresponding record in the Web of Science – to provide you with an easy option to lookup cited references, citing articles and related publications? It took us a while to implement, but we finally came up with this:

screen shot of new sfx service
Example MPG/SFX menu: http://tinyurl.sfx.mpg.de/q45l

The target title ("Web of Science") links to the appropriate full record view and the "Times Cited" count to the citing articles page in the Web of Science (WoS). Please note that access to the WoS database requires a subscription, but all users from the Max Planck Society should have access from their workplace.

The above information is fetched on request by using Thomson Reuters new Links Article Match Retrieval Service (AMR). Our implementation for SFX is a bit preliminary and the service fails to identify the WoS record under certain circumstances (e.g inaccurate or incomplete metadata). Some detailed testing will be done next week, but your feedback is always welcomed!

vLib portal

vLib Resource Feeds get down to the nitty-gritty

There had been two major usage scenarios which motivated us to introduce various RSS feeds for vLib resource lists about a year ago:

  1. Updating individual users about new resources available in the Max Planck Society
  2. Enabling MPG librarians or developers to re-use the resource information available in the vLib portal

Our experiences show that the first use case is pretty obvious to most vLib users while the second requires a lot more explanation… but we are willing to share! Check out the revised documentation of the vLib Resource Feeds to get some ideas and working examples.