The Quarterly Newsletter for UnCover Users Fall 1993
Over 150 UnCover users from across the contry joined the staff of UnCover for the Third Annual UnCover User Group Meeting on October 1,1993 at the Silvertree Hotel in Snowmass, Colorado. Martha Whittaker, General Manager of the UnCover Company, welcomed the group and introduced a varied panel of speakers. Database enhancements and discussions of the role of article delivery in library collection development in the '90s figured prominently in the presentations. New UnCover contributor libraries were also featured.
This Year's keynote speaker was Chuck Hamaker, Head of Collection Development at Louisiana State University. Chuck's address, entiled "Where were you when the paradigm shifted?" talked about his exxperiences with an LSU serials project which considered access to journal titles, rather than use only, in making cancellation decisions. For more details, see the related story on page 5.
In an interesting folow-up to Chuck's remarks, Marianne Babitch, Head of Access Technologies, and Jun Koelker, Associate Director of the library at Texas Christian University (TCU), reported on the use of UnCover in their library. They recognized that new approches to serial collecting were needed if the TCU library were to continue providing the high quality of service to its patrons.
TCU funds "saved" by serial subscription cancellations are placed in a deposit account pool which allows professors to order UnCover articles. Each faculty member is given a deposit account with a minimal amount of money, which is increased as needed. The library believes it is important that the ordering be unmediated for the project to be fully successful, and so far, no one has misused the funds provided.
Melissa Stockton, UnCover Product Specialist, talked about features to be availabe in UnCover during the next year. Date qualification, table of contents delivery via electronic mail, and a pre 1989 citation delivery service are all in development and will be introduced in 1994.
UnCover will be adding journal titles from several new contributing libraries during the next year, the first additions coming from the science libraries at UCLA in mid-December. Holdings from Lane Medical, the University of Maryland, the Iris Consortium in Ireland, and the Australian National Library will follow throughout 1994. UnCover database development coordinator Teresa Mullins, and Chris Beckett, Business Development Manager of Blackwell's Periodical Division, updated the group on the progress on these fronts.
Ted Koppel, UnCover Information Systems Manager, spoke to users about a project currently under development between UnCover and publisher John Wiley & Sons. UnCover will receive contents information from Wiley journals in SGML format. SGML is Standard Generalized Markup Language, a machine readable text format that can be used both by printers and online systems. Contents will enriched with additional information not currently present in all UnCover Records.
A telecommunications link will allow UnCover to send orders for Wiley articles to Wiley for fulfillment and delivery in less than an hour. The user will notice no change in service, except for quicker access to the information.
Next year's meeting will be held in October in Baltimore, Maryland.
The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Biomedical and Physical Science and Technology libraries and Lane Medical Library at Stanford University have contracted with the UnCover Company to provide table of contents information. The libraries will also serve as supply sites for the UnCover article delivery service.
The UCLA Library, with it 95,000 current serial titles, consistently ranks among the top five of the 120 members of the Association of Research Libraries. The library is one of the largest interlibrary loan suppliers in the United States, responding to 70,000-80,000 requests per year.
Lane Medical Library's research collections cover clinical medicine and its specialties, basic sciences, public health and related fields. Lane's periodical holdings number over 3000. Lane Medical Library was founded in 1906, and its biomedical research and clinical medicine collection ranks as one of the finest in the Western United States.
The National Library will provide UnCover with table of contents information and copies of articles from a range of Australian, New Zealand and Pacific periodicals for use by the UnCover service. Under the terms of the Agreement, the ANL will also provide UnCover access to its collections for the delivery of UnCover articles to customers in Australia and worldwide.
UnCover will be made available to individuals and libraries in Australia over the Australian Bibliographic Network, and other appropriate public and private networks, including AARNet.
The University College, Dublin (UCD) will serve as the initial supply site. Plans are in place to begin adding UCD titles in the spring, with other IRIS libraries to follow.
Annette Kelly is director of the consortium, which is currently headquartered at Trinity College, Dublin.
UnCover is happy to introduce a new staff member, Teresa Mullins. Teresa started her position as Database Development Coordinator in September. She received her Masters in Library Science last Spring from the University of Texas at Austin.
Teresa has held positions at the libraries of the University of Denver and the University of Texas, Austin, Her Library experience includes acquisistions, cataloging, and serials. Teresa also attended the University of Denver's Publishing Institute.
As the Database Development Coordinator, Teresa will oversee the growth of the UnCover database. She understands UnCover's important role as a library resource in these times of "access vs. ownership," and is committed to excellence in the database. She is charged with analyzing subject coverage, so that new titles are added according to a logical collection plan. She is also responsible for quality control and editorial decisions concerning the actual data within UnCover. Welcome, Teresa!
An updated User Guide is now available from the UnCover Company. The new Guide includes information on all the new features available in UnCover. One copy of the Users Guide has been sent to all password, gateway, and deposit account users. UnCover will provide up to five Users Guides at no charge. If you would like to receive your five complimentary copies or additional copies of this useful resource, please contact Mare Stevens at the UnCover office.
The costs for multiple copies of the Users Guide are:
25 copies for $ 40 50 copies for $ 70 100 copies for $120
UnCover users outside of America now have their own UnCover Service Desk. Jane Beddall is the UnCover Product Manager for Blackwell's and is based in Oxford, UK. Jane can be reached via Internet e-mail at
uncover@blackwell.co.uk or by telephone at +44 865 261362.Jane works closely with the UnCover staff in Denver, and spent several weeks this fall working in the Denver office. Jane will answer questions about password and gateway service, database coverage, searching, payment options, and connectivity. Of course it's still okay to contact Denver directly, and in fact you should if you have inquires about the status of your article orders.
There's a new dial-in number for Open Access and Password users of UnCover, 303/756-3600. The Internet address for Open Access and Password users is database.carl.org (192.54.81.76).
The Open Access (no password required) option for UnCover was released on September 1,1993. New features were added at this time, such as streamlined ordering and optional user registration.
These changes have had a great impact on the UnCover service and we want to share some of the exciting results.
Users are now given a chance to create profiles, which are used to store delivery information such as name, fax numer, and payment option. Over 10,000 profiles were created in the first month.
UnCover also experienced a dramatic increase in the number of documents delivered in September and October. The figures show a 73% increase over the delivery figures for August!
The most frequently asked question regarding profiles has been "What is a Country Code?" A country code is equivalent to the three digit area codes used with U.S. and Canadian numbers. Use the appropriate country code if your fax machine is located outside the U.S. or Canada. If you are in the U.S. or Canada, you need to leave this field blanck so that your faxed article stays in this continent!
UnCover's new Open access option allows you to search the UnCover database without a password. To try it out telnet to database.carl.org and when prompted for a password, simply press return. Open Access UnCover is just the same as passworded UnCover - with one important difference: article delivery will cost you more.
Open Access users of UnCover will pay $8.50 per article (plus copyright royalty and fax surcharge, where applicable). UnCover users who access the database via passwords or through a gateway will pay the discounted base rate of $6.50.
Gateway users of UnCover will receive the lower per article delivery rate. In addition, depending on the type of gateway, you will have dedicated access channels to UnCover, or access to a somewhat larger number ports than Open Access users. Customized gateway users will continue to see their own UnCover screens and in many cases local holdings.
Cost Center information has been added to the User Profile to accommodate UnCover's many corporate users. It is common practice for business to charge individual departments within their organization for services offered by the library. This accounting information is tracked using cost center codes. UnCover can generate reports based on information entered into the Cost Center field.
UnCover's online, context sensitive help may be accessed at any prompt by entering a question mark (?) and pressing the return key. By entering ?H3, you can view a list of specific help screens available.
Mark and Order is a two-step process for streamlined ordering of articles cited within the database. The <D> for delivery option of the older version of UnCover is no longer used. Instead, you are prompted to mark articles you are considering ordering -- either from the screen of seven short entries, or from the full citation record.
On some VAX computers which run the VMS operating system, the backspace key does not function as it should in the UnCover database. Usually when this happens entering <control H> will do the trick. But at times even this does not work. If you are having a problem with backspace , call the UnCover customer service desc (800-787-7979) and explain the problem. Someone from UnCover technical support will call you back. Unfortunately, this problem cannot always be fixed.
Drawing on the writings of Freemont Rider and others, Chuck Hamaker, keynote speaker at the UnCover Users Group Meeting, argued that, in fact, there has been no paradigm shift in library collection development and storage of information. Hamaker explained that libraries have traditionally adjusted dynamically to changing economic and technological conditions in order to best fulfill their patron's needs.
Online article indexes and delivery services such as UnCover merely present a new and logical choice in serial collection development, not a drastic change in library models.
Faced with budget cuts and the necessity of canceling periodical subscriptions, Louisiana State University (LSU), where Chuck is Head of Collection Development, created a survey for University provessors to aid librarians in determining which serials to cut.
Unfortunately, when the results were in, very few titles were marked for cancellation. Chuck and other LSU librarians then drew on the library tradition of adapting , and rewrote the survey to try and determine which journal titles professors felt they needed. They decided to turn the well-known serials check-list type of survey upside down and ask their patrons what journals they actually use in their research.
The survey specifically asked if each journal needed to physically be in the library, because of photographs, inserts, etc., or if article access on demand would suffice to serve research needs. This second survey was accompanied by a demonstration of UnCover to introduce faculty to the over 15,000 journals available on the database, and to the efficient delivery of articles from these journals.
The results of the second survey differed drastically from those of the first. By asking what was needed, instead of what could be cut, librarians were able to determine the importance of various titles to professors and change the way collection development was being practiced at LSU.
A number of serial subscriptions were canceled, with funds transferred to deposit accounts handled by Interlibrary Loan for article delivery service through UnCover. Interestingly, this survey also resulted in the addition of a few titles, the first time in several years in which new subscriptions were placed.
The UnCover Company now has its own office space! the UnCover staff picked up their belongings and moved down one floor from the CARL Systems office. The space was created specifically for the UnCover staff and provides plenty of room for the daily deliveries of journal issues. The data entry area is more spacious too. Now the staff, which is responsible for entering the table of contents for the 15,000 journal titles included in UnCover, have a little elbow room, and there is space for expansion as the number of titles grows.
In addition, the new offices provide separate space for the customer service representatives -- those folks who answer the 800 number line -- and the quality control unit has a room of its own. If you're in the Denver area, stop by and take a look.