For those of you unfamiliar with the world of libraries (and perhaps even for some of you who are), I thought I'd offer some background on where the data that populates the UHM Electronic Resources Gateway comes from. The Gateway is actually a compilation of two sets of information about the resources to which the University of Hawaii at Manoa has access. Approximately 14,000 electronic journals, databases and books in the Gateway are managed locally by us. These are individual titles and stable collections that the UHM Library or the medical school's Health Sciences Library has subscribed to on behalf of the campus. However, there are an additional 40,000 or so titles in the Gateway that are managed for us by a third-party company called Serials Solutions.
Why farm out some of our electronic resource management duties? It's the easiest and most cost-effective way to make sure our access information for all these resources are up to date. Most of these 40,000 titles are located in full-text aggregated databases such as EBSCO's Academic Search Premier. In such a database, the aggregator, such as EBSCO, licenses certain years worth of full text from many publishers, big and small, and adds the content to its databases. These enhanced databases give us access to many more journals than we would be able to access via our subscriptions alone. However, the aggregators are constantly working with the publishers on the material they license, and as a result the content we have access to in each aggregated database is constantly fluctuating -- new titles come in, existing titles go away.
With this much regular movement within aggregated collections, it would be impractical for an aggregator such as EBSCO to regularly send out title lists for its databases to its thousands of subscribing libraries, many of whom probably only have no more than a handful of staff who maintain their electronic collections. So instead, the aggregator provides updated title data to a management company such as Serials Solutions, and they keep track of all the changes and nicely package up the information for their library clients to export. We pick up their nice package of information about the 40,000 or so titles we have access to via aggregated databases and throw it into the Gateway regularly (usually once a month).
All this is a long way of saying that we ran the Serials Solutions update today. Our total title count came out to about 200 more than before. This was actually the second time this month that we ran the update, as we recently asked Serials Solutions to start tracking our Project Euclid collections for us. These titles are now in the Gateway.
You can also access Serials Solutions data directly via our e-Journal Portal. This may be more up-to-date for titles in aggregated databases as Serials Solutions updates the Portal on a daily basis.
