Serials Solutions is pleased to announce several new enhancements scheduled for release on May 22, 2012. These enhancements are the result of feedback and requests from clients, and reflect our continued commitment to improve management, assessment, and discovery services for libraries worldwide.

Upcoming Enhancements

360 Resource Manager & 360 Counter

• Continued improvements to navigation and the User Interface, including changes to the Navigation Tree to indicate payment types and number of attached objects, providing greater efficiency and better management of e-resource data
• Updates to Management Reports make it easier to use the data you track in Client Center, 360 Resource Manager and 360 Counter for more efficient workflow, including the addition of Custom Dates in the Tracked Resources report
• Enhancements to the 360 Counter User Interface and Serials Solutions 360 Usage Statistics pages used for creating reports and conducting analysis, some optimization of reporting speed, and new reports.
• Coming Soon: Serials Solutions will release additional features to make it easier for libraries to populate license and other management data. Please subscribe to Support Center Answer 719 for ongoing updates.

360 Search, 360 Link and 360 Core

• Updates to the User Interface and reporting speed for 360 Usage Statistics

Ulrichsweb™

• Language localization
  • Help files are now localized for speakers and readers of Quebec French (français québécois)
  • Czech has been added as the newest interface localization option
• The number of items matching a search is now recorded and displayed in Search History
• Users with a personalized My Ulrich's account can now save their preferred Search Results column settings for future sessions
• The Publisher, Online Provider, A&I Service, Country of Publication, and Document Delivery Services indexes have been tuned to return greater precision with auto-complete of search terms

Ulrich's™ XML Data Service

• A new data field, Journal Website URL, has been added to the Special Features field group to enable linking to additional details about free and subscription resources

Stay Up To Date

For complete details on this and past product releases, please visit Support Center Answer 422. Be sure to subscribe by clicking the Notify Me icon to receive automatic notification when new information is available.

A Few Knowledgebase Highlights

Provider (or vendor) record sets are now available through our 360 MARC Updates service.

Member libraries of BIBSAM, a library consortium operated by Kungliga biblioteket, the National Library of Sweden, have access to a number of collections (databases) tracked in the Serials Solutions Knowledgebase.

Titles in the database Berkeley Electronic Press – SURFdiensten have moved to a database from the provider Walter de Gruyter. 

New in the Summon Index

Department of Energy Citations Database (ECD) – The ECD provides free access to over 450,000 electronic documents and citations, primarily from 1943 forward. Citations and documents are made publicly available by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

Department of Energy Patents -- DOepatents is the U.S. Department of Energy's central collection of patent information, where research and development intersect with innovation and invention.

Freedonia Group -- Focus Reports covering eighteen industry categories through over 700 concise market research reports.

HighWire Pharmacology and Microbiology titles -- More than 85,000 journal articles from HighWire publications in the pharmacy, therapeutics, & pharmacology, biology and medicine disciplines.

Oxford Medical Online -- Online versions of medical textbooks and handbooks with hundreds of full-text books and nearly 6,000 book chapters.

PaperC – A Berlin-based e-book platform, PaperC focuses on academic, technical and specialist content. More than 15,000 titles from over 80 German, European and American publishers are represented.

Who was this shining star?

She was Carolyn Ulrich, the originator of Ulrich’s Periodicals Index, which celebrates its 80^th anniversary this year as Ulrichsweb™.   Today we celebrate Carolyn and her incredible contributions to the field of librarianship.

With a career that lasted nearly three decades, Carolyn was a lecturer, author, advocate, and innovator.  Thinking outside the box from the beginning of her career, Carolyn recognized that libraries needed to meet the needs of their patrons as defined by them, not the library.  In 1920 she cited the ‘importance of psychological contacts with the reading public,’ which translated into a sensitivity not only toward what services were delivered, but how they were delivered.  Carolyn knew the client was king. 

Carolyn’s career spanned the years from 1918 to 1946.  During that time she witnessed economic prosperity, the Great Depression, war, recovery, and the continued evolution of American values and thinking.  Her writings and programs reflected a keen understanding of the times.  In 1936 she advocated in the Journal of Social Hygiene that materials on parenthood, sex, venereal disease, prostitution and other similar subjects be made available to the layperson, noting that the public was now less self-conscious about these subjects.  It was a bold suggestion for the time.

Carolyn is probably best known for her pioneering efforts in the management and bibliographic control of serial literature where her efforts were as broad as her thinking.  She spoke on topics such as “A Current Periodicals Room in A Metropolis,’ chaired the ALA’s Periodical Roundtable and the Joint Committee on the Standardization of Periodicals, and concluded her career as the Chief of Periodicals at the New York Public Library.  And, perhaps most enduringly, gave us what is now Ulrichsweb.

Learn more about Carolyn Ulrich and the origins of Systematic Serials control.

Over the past decade, Serials Solutions has grown into a global company dedicated to ensuring the future success of libraries as knowledge centers and information gateways.  The authoritative metadata that we maintain each day in our central knowledgebase has grown and evolved to support discovery and management services for today's and tomorrow's library collections – global coverage of a vast array of resources from  e-journals to eBooks, aggregated databases, Open Access offerings, and more.   Today, KnowledgeWorks remains the core of our Data solutions and supports the Summon® Service Index to provide true web-scale discovery across the full-breadth of library content.

As we continue the development of our new Serials Solutions® Knowledgebase, which is the foundation for Intota™ and will be used by all of our other products and services, we can appreciate that the roots of our commitment to authoritative metadata go back even farther than the year 2000—to 1926 and the work of another forward-looking librarian who understood the need for up to date bibliographic and publisher information that supports librarians and their mission.  

In celebration of the 80^th anniversary year of Ulrich’s™ and its continuing value to librarianship and research, we invite you to read the story of Carolyn Ulrich and the origins of Systematic Serials Control.

Last week I had the chance to present ERMS and its influence on library systems to students at the Dominican University Graduate School of Library Information Science.  Part of this learning session included a live demo of 360 Resource Manager and a scan of other ERM products available to libraries today - both commercial and open source.
 

The presentation was three hours long, and still it wasn’t nearly enough time to cover all the details!  In particular, I would have liked to spend more time on the impacts of e-resource management as a component of an overall library strategic plan.  As I was preparing the lecture, conducting it, and fielding questions from the wonderful student audience, I realized this material could become an entire course. Here’s what I would include:

• The growth of electronic resources over the last decade, and the associated complexities of their discovery and management
• The importance of a knowledgebase and professional metadata management
• Initiatives (like the DLF ERMI) that influenced the development of automation tools
• Current systems and their pros and cons, various business models, their strategic approaches and their impact on the library
• Understanding the purpose and value of related standards, like NISO CORE, OnixPL, COUNTER, SUSHI and KBART
• Workflow approaches and the e-resource lifecycle
• E-resource activation and the associated technical, communication, and reporting requirements
• Collection assessment and selection for electronic resources, including usage statistics analysis
 

Diving deep on the details of e-resources and e-resource management is a huge step in providing students with a strong contextual foundation for the professional world they are entering. I enjoyed being part of this process.

L'Année philologique is a specialized bibliography tool for research in classical studies covering 84 years of classical bibliography since its founding in Paris in 1926.  The goal of L'Année philologique is to collect annually scholarly works relating to every aspect of Greek and Roman civilization including authors and texts, literature, linguistics, political, economic, and social history, attitudes and daily life, religion, cultural and artistic life, law, philosophy, science and technology, and the history of classical studies. Significant space is accorded to the auxiliary disciplines—archeology, epigraphy, numismatics, papyrology and paleography.   

The L'Année philologique database indexes over 1,500 periodicals, with an additional 500 articles from collections.  Articles include abstracts in English, German, Spanish, French, or Italian.

Register Today for Summon the Future as presented by Dr. Mike Eisenberg

Join Dr. Mike Eisenberg, founding dean of the Information School at the University of Washington, and discover his vision of libraries and their importance as place. Dr. Eisenberg shows how libraries are evolving from a center of information to a space of refuge for students to complete their work. Find out where this evolution is going and how Serials Solutions and the Summon® service is part of the process.

This entertaining and informative session explores:

• Libraries and their shifting role from information to space, place, and equipment.
• How technology is changing learning.
• Who is in charge? The erosion of academic authority.

What are the implications for your library? Find out!

About the Speaker

Educator, scholar, advocate, and mentor whose personal motto is, “make it better!”

Dr. Mike Eisenberg is the founding dean of the Information School at the University of Washington, serving from 1998 to 2006.  Known as an innovator and entrepreneur, Mike approached the iSchool as a startup—transforming the school into a broad-based information school with academic programs for all levels (bachelors through doctorate), increasing enrollment 400%, generating millions in funded research, and making a difference in industry, the public sector, and education.

View Mike’s Profile

The tea party event was a fun break in the day and gave the perfect chance to reflect on how our in-house librarians make a difference to our company, our services, and our patrons.  Some examples:

• Customer Support: Eight members of this 13-member team have library degrees.
• Training: This team works with new clients to familiarize them with the products they’ve purchased. The team’s librarians bring specialized assistance during the training process. The training team also gives refresher trainings to existing clients and provides group webinars.
• Program Management: Associates on this team work on feature development and serve as technical liaisons between development and support.
• Data Management: This team manages knowledge updates and provider changes.  The quality of our data requires specialized work, and it’s great to have librarians on this team.  

Yes, we have librarians in almost every department at Serials Solutions, even in Marketing! The annual appreciation party was a great way for the whole company to not only enjoy delicious treats, but recognize our librarians’ influence.