SFX Documentation

Improving A-Z List "Improvements"

Over the summer and early fall I committed a number of experimental "improvements" to the A-Z list. Last week, Donna and I attended a GenRef Meeting to obtain feedback on these changes. After a very interesting discussion, the response was overwhelming:

A-Z List: Now with holdings!

A browse of journal titles in the A-Z List now shows you some holdings information. Think of it as the e-journals version of an anticipated movie's teaser trailer - simultaneously gratifying and frustrating.

Distinct Electronic Journals

A manual re-index of the A-Z list reveals the current number of distinct electronic journals:

23,864

You'll note this is about 2,000 more titles than the previous re-index at the end of May.

2,000 more titles in 5 months doesn't necessarily mean we've purchased this many new titles in such a short time. It does mean that, whether aggregated, newly purchased, or just recently unearthed, 2,000 more individual titles are available via Get It now than this past summer. That's pretty happy stuff.

A-Z List URL redirect

Forget about updating all your old browser bookmarks to the A-Z List. SFX will now take care of it for you.

I've implemented an SFX Apache redirect that automagically sends you from any old A-Z list URL to the  List's current, preferred version. Call it the E-Journals List if you like - you'll still land on the same page.

Any of the following versions of this URL will work:
http://getit.lib.ksu.edu/sfxlcl3/a-z/default
http://getit.lib.ksu.edu/sfxlcl3/azlist/default
http://getit.lib.ksu.edu/sfxlcl3/az/default

And if your URL contains something really old-school like:
pulsar.lib.ksu.edu:3210...
or
catalog.lib.ksu.edu:3210...
that's okay. It will still work.

Let us now sing a hymn in praise of Apache redirects.

A-Z List: The hits just keep coming

On the very heels of the most recent A-Z List improvement comes yet another enhancement. As part of the September 2006 software update, Ex Libris released an AJAX autocomplete option that assists with journal title searches in the A-Z List.

New A-Z List

Also known as the E-Journals List, the A-Z list is new for Fall 2007. It has all the old familiar features you like plus a few new ones. I'd love to hear your comments as you use the new list. Find it here or use the E-Journals link from the Libraries home page.

SFX's summer tan

Because everyone looks a little younger and fresher at the end of the summer, right? So does SFX.
This week we leaned hard on two of the big changes we've been working on for a while. Many details are below....

Number of Unique Active Objects

I have built the A-Z index for the Version 3 A-Z List (available with the 5/28/07 update). During the build, SFX counts and displays the number of unique active objects. Since I've rarely succeeded in making SFX spit out this particular statistic, I'm taking advantage of it. Ready?

21,749 unique active objects.

(object = a journal or other item)

Audrey and A-Z pages

I wanted our bot to be able to crawl and index our a-z pages. Alas, once one sets up the Google Scholar crawl process, the resulting robots.txt files blocks all agents but GS. I had to edit the robots.txt and explicitly allow certain directories for Audrey. Using the disallow none option didn't work for some odd reason.

A-Z List Comparison

I have completed a fairly detailed comparison of the A-Z lists supplied by Serials Solutions and SFX. The full document is linked for you to download and devour.

As of mid-September, Serials Solutions lists nearly 23,000 titles, while SFX lists slightly more than 20,000 titles. So why the big difference?
Serials Solutions is fairly free in its definition of "electronic serial." Of the nearly 3,000 items it lists that SFX does not, at least 1,000 are annual conference and symposium proceedings from IEEE and ACM. Serials Solutions is listing these items by their conference title rather than by their series title. They are difficult to locate in the list even if a user feels like browsing.
SFX directly accesses these items, either through a user's click on the K-State Get It button or through their use of the Citation Linker. Each item in these well-established series has an ISSN, so SFX can usually generate a valid OpenURL to find what is requested.

There are certainly other possible explanations for the nearly 3,000 title difference between the two A-Z lists, but none that accounts for so many titles and fits such a large pattern.

Download ComparisonAtoZlistsSerSolSFX.xls