eResource Management:
Challenges & Solutions
Mark Schregardus
Vice-President, International Sales
Ovid Technologies
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
Agenda
• eResource Management challenges
• How did it all get so complicated so quickly?
• A challenging position for:
• IP’s
• Librarians and Administrators
• End-users
• Tools to assist in eResource Management
• Federated searching
• OpenURL LinkResolvers
• Ovid’s platform for eResource Management
• Developed with consortia in mind!
• Discussion
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
E-resources: current situation
• Bibliographic databases: many, all with
descriptive names (Inspec, Cinahl, etc)
• Electronic journals:
• Subscribed & current
• Subscribed with embargoe
• Free “Open Access” journals
- Current or embargoed
• Individual titles
• Packages: some current, some embargoed,
some archive
• Electronic books
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
E-resources: current situation
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Library Catalog (OPAC)
Dissertation & Theses databases
Image databases
Research portals
Web sites with relevant (quality?) information
Institutional Repositories
Digital Archives
=>Many different platforms, interfaces, search
engines
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
Your Challenges
How do I maximize the value of my
investment in content resources?
• How do I make sure users select & search
the appropriate resources, in the best
possible way
• How do I provide seamless links &
interconnect all available resources….
• …and how do I manage/administrate all this
in a cost-effective manner???
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
How did it all get so complicated?
?
?
Journals@Ovid
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
In the beginning..…
Aggregator (Dark Ages):
• Select a database
• Perform a search
• Retrieve results
• Visit the library
• Find the journal,
• Make a copy
Aggregator (Yesterday):
• Select multiple databases
• Perform a search across
dbs
• Deduplicate results
• Link to full text; or
• Visit the library for print
copy; or
• Link to ILL or Doc Ordering
system
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
Today’s Information Provider
• One of many in the library
• Must link bi-directionally – out to full text, in from
other sources
• Competes with free search engines, free full
text, free web sites
• Competes with publishers’ web sites and
aggregated full text service providers
• Co-exists with search engines like Google,
Yahoo, MSN Search
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
Librarians’ Dilemma: Purchasing
Librarians purchase resources based on:
• Price
• User Interface – one UI is always better than two
• Price
• Vendor reputation & Services
• Price
• Integration with other library resources
• Price
• Ease of use for patrons – trainability
• And of course, PRICE!
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
Librarians’ Dilemma: Training
Helping Users Find Relevant Information:
• Getting users excited about structured searching
• What’s the big deal about
• Boolean logic
• Controlled Vocabularies
• Index Browsing
• Fielded searching
• How do you even get their attention when
there’s an easier way (Google)
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
Googlemania
• Who needs structured searching?
• Abundant results, relevance ranked
• It’s FREE!
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
Googlemania: On the Down Side
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Relevance ranking is Google’s “secret”
Can you be sure you about comprehensiveness
They’re NOT citations
You can’t do much with results
• Limit
• Refine by subject
• Combine results
• Sort results
• Too many results: “Engineers and scientists are
loosing faith in the Open Web and increasing
reliance on peer to peer information seeking”
(Outsell STM Report, Sept. 2005)
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
Google’s Answer…
Google Scholar!
• It’s a beta, so they’re getting away with
ambiguity
• Controlled sources: only peer reviewed
materials as submitted by primary publishers
• Ranking is based on: availability of full text,
publication and number of citations
• It is not going away in the foreseeable future
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
Google Scholar: the downside
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Poor searching of Author and Title
• Data that requires normalization and post processing
No indexing and taxonomies – value add of A/I db’s
Very poor disclosure of what is included/excluded
Serious (and unknown) content gaps:smaller publishers, archives
(finds only 12% of all Blackwell articles, 45% of HW journals, etc)
“Content is the most obscure part of Google Scholar. Apart from the
generic statement on the About page (…) there is no specific
information about the publisher archives or the (p)reprint servers
covered, nor about the type of documents processed (…) or the time
span covered. Just because a service is free doesn't mean that the
producer is not expected to disclose substantial information about
the content”. Peter Jasco, Review of GS Beta, November 2004
Bottom line:
GS is not seen as a viable replacement for structured searching in
applications that offer rich syntax, search tools like limiting, filtering,
sorting, deduplication, alerting, and subject searching, sponsored by
structured human indexing
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
So Far: A Choice Between
• One massive database
• Ease of use and always
results (many!)
• Ranking
• No unified indexing
• No coverage for small and
local language publishers
• Patchy coverage of certain
academic areas
• Poor searching for expert
searchers
• Too much noise?
• Many bibliographic
sources
• Authentication and Training
Issues for Administrators
• Specialised indexing and
advanced search options
• Less “end” user friendly
• Quality control of content,
source disclosure
• Better searching results but
more effort upfront
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
Ovid’s perspective
eResource Management & the role of
Federated Searching and Link Resolver
products for academic institutions and
Consortia
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
Federated Searching & Link Resolvers
Not new, but have traditionally been:
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Expensive
Difficult to implement
Inflexible
Only for selected few
Provided by ILS vendors
Not designed with consortia in mind
• Pricing models
• Lack of self-administration possibilities
• Authentication support
• Customization options
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
Ovid’s approach to Federated Searching:
SearchSolver
• Developed with leader in core federated search technology
• Modern technology
• Supports wide range of search protocols
• No limits on simultaneously searching of targets
• Local language searching
• ASP model: Online hosting
• no technology hassles
• Benefit from scale (price!)
• Focus on extremely fast deployment
• Large existing collection of database connectors
• Customization and Branding options
• Easy administration
• One platform to allow resource integration with workflow tools
(distance learning, HIS, etc) through a single API
Designed with Consortia Customers in Mind
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
What Metasearching CAN Do
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Allows the Information Professional to
 Design a ‘portal’ into the library’s resources;
 Organize the presentation of specific
information sources for focused group or
subject area (Biotech, Social Sciences,
Engineering, etc);
 Expand the discovery process through data
sampling;
 Educate users in the presence of scholarly
search tools and allow access to specialised
interface tools
 Help users properly scope a search
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
Metasearch… NOT
• Cannot mine the native databases’ rich search
tools
• Deduplication - risk removing important citation
information from native search UI
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
A Simple View of the Architecture
ID/PW, IP etc
ID/PW, or
ID/PW & IP
Connectors
(search syntax)
Ovid
SearchSolver
Sources
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
Organize Resources under One Roof – fully
under Librarian’s Control
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Results – A Database
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Results – Full Text
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Results – A Web Page
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In a Nutshell…
• Metasearch provides a solid solution for the
librarian to control information flow to users and
convey the value of using a variety of search
sources for discovery.
• A common interface for returning sampling of
results from many sources
• A pathway to the native search application for
precision search tools.
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
Ovid’s approach to OpenURL Linking:
LinkSolver
• ASP model: Online hosting
• no technology hassles
• Benefit from scale (price!)
• Fast and Easy deployment: upgrade from free Links@Ovid
product
• One-click access to all full text resources from Ovid
databases/journals/books, rather than a “landing page” first.
• Limit to ALL available full text available from Ovid resources
• “Links Packages”: automatic linking from Ovid resources to all
Open Access journals
• Easy administration
• Customization and Branding options
• Embargoe support
• Global Import / Export function
Designed with Consortia Customers in Mind
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
Ovid’s View of eResource Management
• Embrace Federated Search as a Discovery Tool
• Don’t give up Native Search Engine
• precision searching, advanced tools
• Invest in an OpenURL Linking Solution to
centralize administration of:
• electronic holdings
• print holdings
• document delivery / inter-library Loan
• targeted internet resources
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
Ovid’s Platform for eResource Management
?
?
Discovery
*Logos Owned by Respective Companies
Search
Seamless Linking
Journals@Ovid
Full Text
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
Designed with Consortia in mind
• Pricing is based on the required solution for the
consortia, NOT the number of sites, etc:
• Number of database connectors
• Customization of interface(s) and branding
• Allows for complex account structures and
authentication schemes
• Administration and customization at different
levels (consortia, sub-consortia, institution,
department): control in the hands of the
customer
• High-level support services from specialized
sales engineers
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.
Discussion
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Value of A/I databases?
Google (Scholar)?
Federated Searching
OpenURL LinkResolvers
Ovid’s approach to e-Resource Management?
Pricing models and implementation services?
©2004 Wolters Kluwer Health. All Rights Reserved.