Tuesday, September 28, 2010

SFX Should be Working Well Now

The problem with SFX in which JSTOR and IIMPFT links were not connecting for off-campus users should now be fixed.

The only problem with linking inside of SFX that Mykie and I are aware of right now is the traditional problem of Lexis-Nexis not going directly to the article.

If any of you discover bad links in SFX please report them to Mykie. It is particularly helpful if you spot a bad link when you are connecting from home. You can Cc me for everything if you like, but if an error message mentions EZProxy, then definitely let me know about it.

Thanks

Saturday, September 11, 2010

DOI Numbers

I had a phone call from a student today who needed a DOI number for an article being used. I had never heard of this before, and had no idea how to access it at all, particularly from our databases. I think our nursing students have to use it pretty often. I muddled through enough to get the number from another source, however, I thought it might be useful if someone who had the knowledge could explain exactly how to locate the number and whether or not the number is specific to the article only, or to the article and the place that is holding it. Or am I the only one who doesn't know?

:)


Sasha

Friday, September 10, 2010

A difference between SFX and Classic with regard to journals

Something to be aware of. The SFX menu will display links to freely available open-source versions of journals. The classic catalog record for the same journal will usually display our print holdings and any electronic access that we pay for.

At the moment we’re trying to figure out why some of these links in SFX are faulty. But even after we get them fixed everyone should realize that for any given journal there could be this disparity.

At the Ref Desk we have always treated the catalog record as the definitive source for our journal holdings. We should continue to do so with the understanding that SFX does contain some ‘extras’ that are not presently accounted for in the catalog record. As you can see from Mykie’s message below these may be worked into the catalog at some point in the future.

Tom

From: Mykie Howard
Sent: Friday, September 10, 2010 9:24 AM
To: Tom Kmetz
Cc: Mark Aaron Jarvis; Ophelia H. Chapman
Subject: RE: Why are Open Source Journals Insisting to be Proxied in SFX?

Anything that is “free” in SFX is not cataloged in Voyager. Perhaps that’s something Bridgette and I can look into in the future, but for now, we’re concentrating on pd. things. She’s still working on the recent JSTOR collections we purchased.


Mykie