As promised, here are the responses that I received, off the list, to my
query about using Uncover Reveal. Thanks to everyone! I'll let you know
when we get to the implementation stage.
Susan Smith
Weyerhaeuser Technology Center
Tacoma, WA
smiths@wdni.com
_________________________________
We are beginning to plan for implementation of UnCover Reveal in the next
few months. We have not had a TOC service, so we don't have to wean anyone
from it. We made a presentation to the Library Committee two days ago and
they were extremely pleased with this new service. As it stands now, we
will simply pay the institutional fee and let our users set up and manage
their own profiles. They can decide what journals they want to be alerted
to and everything will go to their own e-mail accounts. We will not
support document delivery thru CARL, so if they want to order documents
they will have to use their own credit card. We will provide document
delivery from previously established channels, primarily thru the network
of medical libraries in the region where we do not charge each other.
Danny Jones Briscoe Library University of Texas Health Science Center at
San Antonio
----------------------------------------------------------------
Susan, just a quick note to reply to your message on SERIALST concerning
Uncover Reveal. We have been providing our faculty here at the
University of Maryland School of Law with Uncover Reveal Tables of
Contents for several years. The library sets up each faculty member's
account and keeps track of journal titles (and key word searches)
selected. Tables of contents are delivered weekly directly from Uncover
to each faculty email box. If a faculty member wishes to have a
particular article photocopied, he simply forwards the TOC information to
the library via email. If we subscribe to the journal, the photocopy is
made from our collection. If we do not subscribe to the journal, we may
order the needed item from Uncover, or we may obtain it through other
channels. We maintain a deposit account with Uncover.
Our faculty like this service - for delivery of TOCs based on titles, it
works wonderfully well. They like the fact, as well, that Uncover offers
such a breadth of coverage, and they can select titles from a very wide
range of subject areas. Unfortunately Uncover is not so good for delivery
of information based on key words. I've been using it myself for delivery
of information about EDI and document delivery, and am quite satisfied,
but our faculty have not been impressed with the word approach. The
difficulty is that, if an article does not contain any word in the title
which gives an indication of the subject matter, there is no way for that
item to be included in the TOC delivery. You know that articles sometimes
have very fanciful titles. These are likely to be overlooked by Uncover.
For the subject approach, we have continued to subscribe to a law-specific
service which is based on someone actually reading the articles, and
assigning a subject heading to them. We are also experimenting with
another TOC delivery service, this one online, which also provides TOCs by
subject, based on a review of the material, not simply a machine-based
scan of the words in the title.
I'm not sure that we've managed to save much staff time by providing
Uncover Reveal - it's more of an enhancement to existing services at
present, because we have not been able to give up the subject approach.
We have managed to cut down considerably on photocopying TOCs in house -
we still do it for some title which are not in Uncover - but my guess is
that whatever savings we had there have been put into the photocopying
effort. I don't have any good statistics to offer - other than the
number of items requested for copying and how many are supplied in-house
and how many come from Uncover versus other external document delivery
means.
Hope some of this helps. Good luck.
Pamela Bluh
Associate Director for Technical
Services & Administration
Thurgood Marshall Law Library
University of Maryland School of Law
20 North Paca Street
Baltimore, MD 21201
410-706-7400 FAX:410-706-8354
pbluh@umabnet.ab.umd.edu
-----------------------------------
Susan--We have been Reveal users for several years. Here at Mortensen
Library TOC goes directly to the users. We set the faculty up with
accounts and they get to select the titles of their choice. The library pays
the yearly fee for the service. Works great and it sure is faster than
photocopying each issue.
Randi L. Ashton-Pritting
Head of Periodicals
Mortensen Library
<pritting@UHAVAX.HARTFORD.EDU>
---------------------------------
I will send you an information packet on Reveal via post. Please feel free
to contact me if you have any questions.
You may also want to visit our Web site at http://www.carl.org/uncover. On
the opening page, click on the box labeled "About Reveal." Detailed
information and instructions are available there.
Gordon Loui
Marketing Specialist
The UnCover Company
3801 East Florida Avenue, Suite 200
Denver, Colorado 80210
USA
E-mail: gloui@carl.org
Voice: (303) 758-3030
Fax: (303) 758-5946
-------------------------------------------
Researchers at Kerr Lab supporting EPA's environmental research
in subsurface and soil remediation and using this service. Initially,
it was a slow go to stimulate adoption. We have about 25 people on
a 50 user site license, which is plenty. As we face federal budgetary
reductions, this provides us with a corner of access to the citations
thus preserving access to theinformation in the articles whether we
can afford to subscribe or not. Many of the researchers consider it
a timesaving tool in a busy schedule, especially those who have
predefined searches running against the 18,000+ titles in the database.
It is well worth the money, in my opinion. We did have to designate
a site coordinator to keep track of profiles, passwords, and who's
got what journals on their routings. It is much less time consuming
than the old form of manual routing. We e-mail the requests to
the Library Aide for copying; what she can't fill in-house is e-mailed
to the ILL technician for ILL's.
Cynthia Bruno, Director (contractor)
EPA SPRD Library
Ada, Oklahoma 74820
-----------------------------
Our serials cataloger forwarded your posting for feedback on Reveal to me.
We pay the $20 annual fee for Reveal for our faculty members who want to
subscribe. They establish their own user profiles with UnCover; send us
their profile numbers; and we tell UnCover to charge the $20 fee to the
library's deposit account. We probably have about 25-30 faculty that have
signed up this way. So far it seems to be working out okay.
We dealt with photocopied tables of contents years ago for one or two
departments, but not recently. Reveal just seems like a much easier way
to go.
If you have enough users interested in the service, you might consider a
site license for Reveal. We decided against the site license because we
weren't sure how many faculty would really be interested and because we
wanted a little more direct control over who was authorized for Reveal via
our library account.
We also subsidize article delivery from UnCover up to a certain dollar
amount for faculty, staff, and students.
Good luck.
Don Richardson ** drichard@wpi.edu
Reference Librarian ** Gordon Library
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
100 Institute Road ** Worcester, MA 01609-2280
Voice (508) 831-5410 ** Fax (508) 831-5829
