The MBL/WHOI library supports the research efforts of scientists from two private laboratories and two federal government facilities located in Woods Hole, a village in the Town of Falmouth on the southwestern corner of Cape Cod. Together these four institutions occupy more than 60 buildings, use 13 research vessels and collection boats, employ more than 1,400 people, and offer instruction to approximately 500 students. The research at the MBL uses marine life as a model system for basic research in biology. Such studies involve the biophysical mechanisms underlying learning and behavior, light-sensitive pigments of photoreceptor cells, color vision, cell growth and division, and the ecology of the coastal zone.

WHOI studies all branches of oceanography: the sea flow, the water, plants and animals, and the processes that occur at the surface where air and water meet.

Because of the diversity of the research conducted in Woods Hole, the library collection includes a wide variety of scientific materials. Journals from areas as diverse as marine biology, radioanalytical chemistry, fisheries, geology, pesticides, physics, natural history, and petroleum geology are included in their collection. Teresa Mullins, Database Development Coordinator for UnCover, is in the process of examining the list of their holdings, and will begin adding new titles to the database during the spring of 1995. The MBL/WHOI Library will begin supplying articles as soon as equipment has been installed.

Please join us in welcoming the Marine Biological Laboratory/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Library to the UnCover family.

S.O.S. Service Adds UK Office

UnCover S.O.S.-- Single Order Source--is now more accessible to users outside of North America through an extension of the service offered at the BH Blackwell office in the UK. Alison McKevitt, formerly with the Bodleian Library, joined the UK office in December as the UnCover Customer Support Officer.

The UnCover S.O.S. service allows anyone to order articles from UnCover's more than 16,000 journals by the method of choice--fax, phone, or e-mail. UnCover S.O.S. staff verify that the article can be supplied by UnCover, and place the order on behalf of the customer. The charge for orders placed through S.O.S. is $10 US plus copyright fee (and appropriate fax surcharge outside North America).

For more information on the UK UnCover S.O.S. service, contact Alison McKevitt at: +44 1865 261 362 (phone), +44 1865 261 314 (fax), or uncover@blackwell.co.uk.

UnCover Offers Table of Contents Re-distribution Service

Tired of making multiple photocopies of the table of contents from every journal in your library's collection to manually route to researchers and faculty members? Do you have requests for alert service for journals that your library doesn't carry?

The UnCover Company offers a Table of Contents Re-distribution Service which permits you to receive tables of contents from journals at a central location and then re-route the material to individuals within your organization. Any number of titles from the over 16,000 journals included in the UnCover database may be selected. The information is sent out electronically as soon as the next issue is checked into the UnCover database, usually within 24 hours of its receipt at the UnCover office. The table of contents information may be sent out either by e-mail or as a data file via FTP to a central address. Information from the table of contents may be re-distributed by e-mail or fax, or may be stored for a specified length of time in a central data file accessible to the institution's constituents.

The cost for the service is $8 US per title per year. A one-time set-up fee of $250 US is charged if programming is required, e.g. setting up an FTP process or customizing messaging within the table of contents. Quotes for special services will be provided for extensive customization requirements.

For more information, contact Brenda Bailey at (303) 758-3030, or send e- mail to bbailey@carl.org.

UnCover Reveal --Online Magazine Product of the Year

Martha Whittaker, with Ted Koppel, Information Systems Manager of UnCover and Senior Analyst for CARL Corporation, travelled to the Online '94 CD-ROM Conference in San Francisco in October to accept the award.

UnCover Reveal, an electronic table of contents alert service, received the 1994 Online Magazine Product of the Year Award for best online search product. Introduced earlier this year, UnCover Reveal allows users with UnCover profiles to create a list of journal titles in which they are interested. When the next issue of any of those titles is entered into the UnCover database, the table of contents is automatically e-mailed to them. Articles cited in the table of contents may be ordered for delivery by reply e-mail or fax.

"We know there is a real market for this service because the response to UnCover Reveal has been overwhelming. In fact, we already have more than 10,000 people signed up," says Martha Whittaker, UnCover General Manager. "So, we are especially thrilled to receive this recognition from Online Magazine and our industry."

Martha Whittaker, UnCover Company General Manager, and Ted Koppel, Information Systems Manager of UnCover and Senior Analyst for CARL Corporation, received the Online Magazine Product of the Year Award from Nancy Garman, Editor of Online.

Third Annual UnCover User Group a Success in Baltimore

The Third Annual UnCover User Group meeting was held in Baltimore, Maryland on October 15.

Approximately 125 people attended. Brenda Bailey, Marketing and Client Liaison for UnCover, and Ted Koppel, UnCover Information Systems Manager, hosted the meeting. Brenda presented an overview of the past year, describing the increase in the number of documents delivered; the success of the release of the new UnCover Complete, UnCover Reveal, and UnCover S.O.S. services; enhanced Cost Center Reporting; and the increase in staff at the UnCover office. Two new contributor libraries were added during the past year: National Library of Australia and University College Dublin. Jane Beddall, UnCover Product Manager at BH Blackwell in Oxford, England, provided an overview on UnCover usage outside of North America (see Blackwell).

New features scheduled for release during the coming year were also described. These include streamlined searching, enhancements to customized gateways, availability of monthly reports in machine readable form, enhancements to Reveal which include subject current awareness searching, a graphical user interface to UnCover, the addition of non- English language journals to the database, and Phase II of UnCover S.O.S. which will allow users to order any type of material through UnCover.

Ted and Brenda discussed and demonstrated several new customized gateway features, including the ability to group large consortium sites by type of library, a feature now in place at the Rochester Regional Library Council in New York, and support for subsidized unmediated ordering.

Joan Beam, Social Sciences and Humanities Reference Librarian, and Minna Sellers, Sciences and Technology Reference Librarian, gave a presentation on Subsidizing and Evaluating UnCover Document Delivery at Colorado State University (see Synopsis). John Duane, PAC/GUI Team Leader for CARL Corporation, demonstrated a test version of the new graphical user interface to UnCover, the Personal UnCover Navigator, which will be released in the first quarter of 1995.

In 1995, UnCover will hold four User Group meetings in the fall, located in different regions of the United States. Locations and dates for the meetings will be announced in the Spring 1995 issue of UnCover Update.

UnCover WWW Page

UnCover now has a home page on the World Wide Web. The URL (address) is: http://www.carl.org/uncover/unchome.html

The home page includes a telnet path to the UnCover database, information about UnCover services and pricing, and a copy of the current UnCover Update newsletter as well as an archive of back issues. Also available is a list of all of the titles included in UnCover. This list will be updated on a monthly basis, and may be downloaded with FTP. The title list is also available through anonymous FTP, for those who don't have full Web access; FTP to carl.org, log in as anonymous, and give your network ID (e-mail address) as password. The titles list is in the directory pub/ and is named titles.zip.

Future plans for additional information include a glossary of UnCover terminology and a quick guide for using UnCover. If you have comments or questions about this service, e-mail them to

jeff@carl.org

Subject Breakdown of UnCover Database

During the past year, new journal titles have been added to the UnCover database as new contributor libraries were added, and as new subscriptions were added by existing contributor libraries. A new subject breakdown of all titles included in the UnCover database has been completed by Teresa Mullins, Database Development Coordinator for UnCover. This subject analysis will be updated periodically as needed when a significant number of new titles have been added to the database. The information below is current as of December 1994.

Science, Technology & Medicine
Pure Science 21%
Applied Science 17%
Medicine 13%
Total 51%

Social Sciences
Business 9%
History 8%
Law 6%
Sociology 4%
Education 3%
Geography 3%
Political Science 2%
Psychology 2%
Religion & Philosophy 2%
Other 1%
Total 40%

Humanities
Literature 5%
Art & Architecture 2%
Music 2%
Total 9%

Top Twenty-five Reveal Titles

The UnCover Reveal e-mail table of contents alert service has been extremely popular among UnCover users. The top 25 requested titles for the alert service are:

1. Nature
2. Science
3. Online
4. Library Journal
5. Journal of Academic Librarianship
6. The New England Journal of Medicine
7. Internet World
8. Scientific American
9. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science
10. Harvard Business Review
11. Database
12. Library Trends
13. Library Hi Tech
14. Cell
15. JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association
16. Computers in Libraries
17. The Journal of Biological Chemistry
18. RQ
19. Ecology
20. College & Research Libraries
21. Physical Review Letters
22. RSR: Reference Services Review
23. Journal of the American Chemical Society
24. The Lancet
25. Oecologia

UnCover Reveal is an electronic table of contents alert service. Users with UnCover profiles can create a list of titles which are of interest to them. When the next issue of any of those titles is entered into the UnCover database, the system will automatically send a copy of the table of contents to the profiler's e-mail address. Users may order documents through Reveal by reply e-mail or fax.

BH Blackwell Shows UnCover at International Online '94

Attendance at the International Online Conference, this year held in London, rose by 40% to over 12,000 people, making it the largest online event in the world. As last year, there was a huge amount of interest in UnCover. BH Blackwell had four terminals at their booth which were used for UnCover demonstrations. Jane Beddall, UnCover Product Manager at Blackwell's Oxford office, gave a Product Review which was attended by about 120 people. Shown here are Jane Beddall and Alan Sharp of BH Blackwell's.

Subsidized UnCover Document Delivery at Colorado State

In February 1994, Colorado State University Libraries began a subsidized document delivery pilot project using the UnCover database and document delivery service, which has been continued into the current academic year. All registered patrons using terminals in the library may identify and order articles directly from UnCover, provided those articles are not in the CSU collection and the total cost of the article with copyright fee does not exceed $25. UnCover staff designed special screens and prompts for ordering. Users had the option of having the fax delivered to a personal fax machine, or to the commercial copy center in the library for a fee of $2.

The service has been extremely popular, especially among graduate students. Undergraduates used the service heavily as well, perhaps because UnCover's turn-around time is much faster than traditional interlibrary loan document delivery.

The subsidized project was viewed positively among the CSU campus community. The users liked the ease of use, ability to order without intervention of the library staff, and the timeliness. CSU plans to continue this subsidized service throughout the current academic year, and plans to expand availability to on-campus users who access the system via telnet. For further information on this project, contact Minna Sellers at 1-303- 491-1877 or Joan Beam at 303-491-1861.

Note: This is a synopsis of a presentation given by Minna Sellers and Joan Beam of Colorado State University at the UnCover Third Annual User Group Meeting on October 15, 1994, in Baltimore, Maryland.

The World of UnCover: What's Happening Outside North America

Jane Beddall, UnCover Product Manager at BH Blackwell, Oxford, England

Usage of UnCover outside of North America has grown considerably during the past year. UnCover is now delivering articles to customers based in approximately 60 different countries, in all five continents. Users come from as far afield as Yugoslavia, Papua New Guinea, South Africa, Japan, Peru, and Saudi Arabia.

Australia and New Zealand account for approximately 68 percent of the total articles delivered overseas. Use of UnCover in Australia is in part encouraged by the National Library of Australia, who this year became a contributing site and also a marketing partner of UnCover. Europe accounts for 21 percent of the delivery traffic. In Europe, the IRIS Consortium was established as a new contributor library this past year. The IRIS Consortium comprises of five university libraries. These are Dublin City University, Forbairt, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, University College Galway and the University of Limerick. The University College Dublin is supplying articles at this time.

This year also saw the launch of the BIDS UnCover service. BIDS stands for Bath Information and Data Services and is run by Bath University in England. BIDS offers networked, data set services to the academic community and was inspired by services offered by academic institutions in North America. The service is used by approximately 80 major academic institutions in the UK, and also has a number of customers in Scandinavia and Australia.

Other developments are underway with an organization called SABINET, who are based in South Africa. Although managed as a commercial enterprise, SABINET is wholly owned by the major universities in South Africa and their role is to provide access to national and international information sources, at a price which an individual member library could not contemplate on its own. In addition, SABINET also provides support for national interlibrary loan. SABINET plans to provide a gateway to UnCover for its member libraries, as well as an access path for those customers who do not have Internet access.

Document delivery has become an extremely hot topic in the information world in Europe now. In the UK we have been lucky enough to receive excellent press coverage of UnCover in some of our more highly respected national newspapers, notably, the Sunday Times and the Independent, and in widely read magazines such as Internet World. We are intending to ensure that UnCover maintains this high profile and over the next few years, we hope that UnCover is as great a success in the rest of the world as it has been in North America.

Note: This is a synopsis of a presentation given by Jane Beddall at the UnCover Third Annual User Group Meeting on October 15, 1994, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Tips for Faster Customer Service

The Customer Service staff at UnCover work hard to answer questions and follow-up on requests for information on the status of article orders. During busy times, you can help them assist you more quickly and efficiently.

If you have already spoken with a representative about a problem, please ask for that person again to answer further questions. That person has all the background on the problem and will be able to assist you more quickly.
When you contact the office about the status of a particular order, have the Order Number ready (also called the Control Number on the cover sheet of the faxed article), and be ready to describe the exact nature of the problem.
If you have several orders to check, it is helpful to e-mail or fax in the list of Order Numbers. This eliminates numerical errors that sometimes occur when taking down long strings of numbers over the telephone.

Contact UnCover Customer Service by phone, e-mail or fax at:
(800) 787-7979 (phone)
(303) 758-5946 (fax)

uncover@carl.org

UnCover FEDLINK Supplier Status Renewed

UnCover's status as a FEDLINK supplier for federal libraries has been renewed. The BOA (Basic Ordering Agreement) contract number is 95CLFB70025. FEDLINK members enjoy the same low delivery rates as other UnCover customers.

Look for UnCover at upcoming conferences:

January 30: National UnCover User Group Meeting; Sydney, Australia
January 31-Feb 2: Information Online & On Disc,; Sydney, Australia, at the BH Blackwell booth
February 3-5: Baltic Bookfair,; Tallinn, Estonia, at the BH Blackwell booth
February 4-6: American Library Association,; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the CARL Corporation, Readmore, and BH Blackwell booths
February 8-9: Information '95; Helsinki, Finland, at the BH Blackwell booth
March 7-9: Computers in Libraries; London, England, at the BH Blackwell booth
March 11-13: Alaska Library Association; Juneau, Alaska at the BH Blackwell booth
March 27-28: Digital Libraries Conference; Singapore
March 29-April 1: Association of College and Research Libraries; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the UnCover and BH Blackwell booths

UNCOVER Listserver

UnCover now has a listserver (appropriately named UNCOVER) designed to provide a discussion forum for UnCover users.

To subscribe, send mail to either listserv@uhccvm.bitnet or listserv@uhccvm.uhcc.hawaii.edu.

The message should be: subscribe uncover firstname lastname.

Do not CC and do not provide a subject.

UnCover Update, ISSN 1077-4130, is published quarterly by
The UnCover Company,
3801 E. Florida, Suite 200,
Denver CO 80210
Telephone: 303.758.3030
Internet:

uncover@carl.org

Subscriptions are available free upon request

General Manager: Martha Whittaker
Editor: Brenda Bailey, Marketing and Client Liaison
Copy Editing, Layout, Webification: Jeff Holland
(c) 1995 The UnCover Company