Enclosed please find notes from the ALCTS-SS Research Libraries
Discussion Group meeting last month in Boston. Many thanks to Gracemary
Smulewitz for taking notes and producing this writeup.

-Laura

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ALCTS SS RESEARCH LIBRARIES DISCUSSION GROUP

INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION IN E-JOURNALS MANAGEMENT

January 15, 2005

Facilitator: Laura Kane McElfresh, Serials Cataloger, Emory University -
Chair, ALCTS SS Research Libraries Discussion Group

Presenter - Dr. Donald Panzera, Library of Congress

Presenter - Dr. Evelinde Hutzler, EZB; Universitatsbibliothek Regensburg

Topic: International Cooperative E-journals Management

The premise for the development of the EZB, Elektronische
Zeitschriftenbibliothek -Electronic Journals Library – There are too
many titles for us to keep up with; libraries need to work in
collaboration to develop access to e-journals of scholarly publications.

University Library of Regensburg developed the EZB for the larger
research community. In 2002 a representative of the Library of Congress
and the EZB met at the Frankfurt Book fair. This meeting sparked an
interest for the Library of Congress to participate. Shortly thereafter
LC and EZB signed a memorandum of understanding forming a collaborative
effort to combine resources. LC decided to join because EZB is where the
ejournals are: 20,600 ejournals of which 8,000 are full text, 2,300 are
born digital. This is supplemented by 21,000 titles in aggregators

The EZB is a cooperative effort and presently has 291 members- 290 are
European and 1 is the Library of Congress. The program builds access
through collaboration. As membership increases, so does collection, each
member provides tools, licensing and holdings. The database is
maintained collaboratively as well and is freely accessible.

24% of the publications are German publications, 23% are from United
States and 53% are from other countries.

The EZB provides free access to database, persistent URLS, licensing and
holdings data, ejournal metadata and MARC 21 bibliographic data per the
Deutsche Bibliothek. The cost is $0 and takes .25 FTE for Database
Maintenance and .25 FTE for other obligations.

The EZB does not store any journal content, it provides access and
employs a universal traffic light system: green light means freely
accessible, yellow light means that the institution has a license
agreement for this journal and it is accessible to patrons of that
institution, red light means not accessible. Accessibility is contingent
on who is searching and the licensing agreements for that title.

Each member can explain its own access provisions and the EZB can be
linked to the member’s library catalog.

The EZB can be integrated into the internet library, Vascoda
(www.vascoda.de <http://www.vascoda.de/>). The mission is to improve the
information and research availability in Germany. If Vascoda is searched
EZB links can be accessed. The EZB brings the user to the point of local
access and immediate availability.

EZB is connected with Vascoda via OPEN URL. It links to various levels
of ejournal access and provides deep article linking for 8,000
ejournals, linking to issues, volumes or journal homepages; linking to
free and licensed full text.

The Library of Congress is cultivating an International Electronic
Exchange project. The purpose is to share the burden of obtaining,
maintaining, preserving and providing ongoing access to information
products. The hope is to reduce processing costs and provide timely
access. The participants are:

LC- GOP

National Library of Medicine

National Art Library

Deutsche Bibliotek

State Library of Berlin

EZB

The intent is to exchange access to content and intellectual property
rights; exchange pertinent metadata, develop interoperability, IT
systems and cooperative reference service. An ongoing exchange exists on
a sporadic basis so far.

More information about EZB –

    * Why is the collaboration in Germany? Because the EZB partnership
      is easy and it is where the most data is available.
    * The subjects come from German subject classification.
    * List of titles is accessed by going to browse function on the EZB
    * LC did a crosswalk from LC subjects to German subject lists
    * Can search by keyword in English
    * Government Documents are part of the exchange. In Germany many
      institutions are government supported.
    * EZB started as a collaborative effort between Regensburg and the
      Technical Institute of Munich.
    * The EZB is mainly a user service, not a consortium, not a buying
      unit and not a cataloging unit.
    * Statistics show that users are satisfied, the latest count reveals
      more than 10 million title inquiries.
    * Each member is responsible for their own licensing information
    * There is a question as to whether the records will be going into
      the CONSER database
    * EZB wants libraries to create links from their catalogs, libraries
      can link themselves or contact Evi.
    * LC slogan – MFBC – “more, faster, better, cheaper”.

--
Laura Kane McElfresh
Serials Cataloger
Mathematics & Computer Science Librarian

Emory University                   Phone: 404-727-1613
Woodruff Library                   Fax:   404-727-0053
Atlanta, GA 30322                  Email: lmcelfr@emory.edu
http://web.library.emory.edu/subjects/science/math/mathguide.html