- Email: [email protected]
Lost in cyberspace? Issues in subject access to electronic journals
The Balance Point
Karen Cargille, Column Co-Editor
LOST IN CYBERSPACE? ISSUESIN SUBJECTACCESSTO ELECTRONICJOURNALS Edited by Karen Cargille, with contributions
from Ann Schaffner,
Steve Shadle, and Carroll Davis
Cargille is Head, Acquisitions Department, Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, Dept. 0175A, La Jolla, CA 92093-0175.
-THEBALANCEPOINT-
As libraries enter into the age when an increasing number of their primary journals are available in electronic format, the challenges of subject access to this information can be handled in a variety of ways. As of the writing of this column, standards have yet to emerge. Some users of libraries see the day that everything will be available electronically and there will be no more need for either libraries or librarians. Those of us involved in acquiring and providing access to the serial literature continue to see an important role for libraries and librarians in helping users find their way through the increasing morass of information available in cyberspace. The Balance Point asked three serialists with an interest in subject access to serials to speculate on problems in providing subject access to electronic journals. Ann Schaffner, associate director for public services at Brandeis University, was asked to take the public services perspective and speculate on the kinds of subject access she would like to see for her faculty and students. Steve Shadle and Carroll Davis are both serials catalogers, from the University of Washington and Columbia University, respectively. They were asked to speculate on some real world solutions to the problem of subject access for electronic journals.
VOL. 24, No.2 (SUMMER~~~~)
101
The three papers exemplify the problem very well. Schaffner describes a possible scenario that partners users and libraries in developing personalized collections and visualization tools. Shadle describes the variety of approaches used by libraries today, and Davis calls for restudy and redefinition of the fundamental categories used in forms cataloging. At this point the solutions are not clear, but the discussions need to continue if libraries are to be able to help keep our users from becoming lost in cyberspace.
LOST IN CYBERSPACE? SUBJECTACCESSTO ELECTRONICJOURNALS Ann Schaffner
At a recent Science Library Faculty Committee meeting at my institution it was not services, staffing, Internet connectivity, or even budget requests that generated the most interest. Instead it was the question raised by one faculty member, “You aren’t going to move the physics journals AGAIN, are you?’ Other faculty members murmured their agreement. What does this have to do with subject access for electronic journals? Everything. Our library, in a somewhat quirky fashion, organizes both current and bound journals in broad subject categories and then alphabetically by title. Faculty members use these arrangements on a daily basis as they browse the collections and follow references. The library had recently undergone a series of renovation projects that required shifting our journals several times. By making these changes we had destroyed the visual cues and intellectual maps of the working collections in their fields. As we move into cyberspace we must make sure that we do not do the same thing to our users. We must not forget the basic human need to organize and visualize information. Our arrangement of volumes on the shelf and our library catalogs have provided such organization in the past. The faculty members’ comments speak for the importance of the physical arrangements of the volumes on the shelf. What of our catalogs? I think it is everyone’s experience that catalogs are most useful in locating known titles from references. Following the trail of references from article to article is a time-worn approach to the literature that is still used by researchers of all types. I once worked on a library instruction session for a professor who wistfully referred to this
102 SERZALSREVIEW
practice as leading to “a life of unending bibliographic frustration!” The usefulness of subject access for journal titles is another matter. We are infrequently asked specifically for a listing of our journal titles in biology or intemational finance. Why should we bother, then, with subject access, either by classification or subject headings? At the Brandeis Science Library our Web page for electronic journals is organized along the same lines as our print collections-by broad subject area and then alphabetically by title.’ Since the Web allows us to provide multiple points of access, we also provide a strict alphabetical listing and a listing by collection, publisher, or “aggregator” when appropriate. It is the broad subject classification, however, which we feel provides the best opportunity for electronic browsing. By mirroring the intellectual and physical organization of our print collections, it gives our users a standard organizing principle and helps them to make the transition from print to electronic journals. Research supports the importance of visual formatting in making sense of information.2 This functions at the page level-we all can recollect the disorientation we experience when viewing a plain text version of an article as opposed to one that is structured and formatted visually. The design and presentation of a well-formatted page helps to clarify the intellectual structure of an article and helps us to remember how to find information later. The same factors apply to journal titles and collections of titles. The organization of volumes on the shelves helps our users to find their way around our collections and recall what they found and where. What happens to these clues in cyberspace? We all have had the experience of following links from websites until we have lost our mental picture of where we started and where we have gone. We need to develop new ways of representing the visual and intellectual structures that represent an individual’s “information space.” Interesting work in this area is being pursued by a number of researchers in information science, and some has been incorporated into contemporary search engines and tools.3 How can we help our users orient themselves in this new electronic world? Publishers are contributing with presentations of electronic journals that include an image of the cover-the visual image helps us to remember and identify the journal at hand. Welldesigned library Web pages with a broad subject organization to facilitate electronic browsing as mentioned above are another good first step. Currently such pages
-KAREN CARGILLE-
are built by adding titles to subject categories as we build Web pages-often duplicating the effort of cataloging. Surely in the future we should be able to create subject-based Web pages from the subject coding in our cataloging records. The library pages could include certain standard subject breakdowns or could be generated dynamically in response to a user’s request. Do our current Library of Congress Subject Headings serve us well in building these kinds of tools? Do our current integrated library systems support the use of our cataloging records in this way? These are the kinds of questions we should consider as we move into the future. While subject collections designed and presented by the library will help our users to bridge the gap from paper to electronic, electronic journal collections can do much more. How many of us have longed for a personal library that includes the research materials that we use most frequently? The paper analog is the small collection of journals and books in a faculty office or lab. Electronic journals allow us to extend this concept-users can create their own collections from among the many e-journals made available to them. Limitations of space and cost to the individual are no longer relevant. In a brilliant move, the designers of Web browsers have incorporated this function into their software with the bookmark capability. Faced with the multitude of resources available to us all, the power and control of selecting and organizing our own resources, whether via an enhanced bookmark system or creating our own Web pages, is compelling. What role might the library play in this scenario? Certainly we will be making the electronic journals and other publications available to our user communities. In addition, we should be providing educational and support services to help our users create effective personal, virtual collections. We all know how quickly one can get in trouble in organizing a subject collection without understanding the role of authority control. We have the skills to provide training that can help our users to avoid these pitfalls. Undergraduate students are leading the way in building these virtual personal collections. In the past some colleges and universities sponsored contests for the best undergraduate book collection-perhaps this concept can be revived in a new way for the electronic collections of the future. In addition to building personalized collections, users now have powerful tools, as mentioned earlier, to build visual representations of “information space” to help them make sense of and navigate a certain body of information. Typically these tools are applied to depicting a Website, a collection of documents (by a given
-THEBALANCEPOINT-
author or presented at a particular conference, for example) or to the results of a subject search. A quick look through some of the work in progress is a truly mind-boggling experience! Documents and their relationships are represented as blobs, webs, graphs, trees, mountains or wheels. Clusters of documents sharing keywords, authors, provenance, subjects or references are visually connected in any number of creative ways. One system takes an individual’s collection of bookmarks and represents it as a three-dimensional space that can be walked through with a virtual reality tool.4 Another takes the results of a 239.50 search and displays the resulting MARC records visually.” Without standards, each of these tools gives a quirky, individualistic view of information-some immediately appeal to us while others may seem off-base, due to our own individual preferences-but they are powerful tools with a great deal of potential. What role might our own subject headings or classification schemes play in building these personalized collections and new visualization tools? At some point the personalized collections may take precedence and libraries will merely provide alternative classification and controlled vocabulary sources for people to use along with the above-mentioned training in the principles of authority control in building their own collections. On the other hand, not everyone wants to invest the time and energy to build and maintain extensive individual collections, and library subject access may supply the basis for tools to automatically generate basic subject collections for individuals to incorporate into their own personalized systems or to modify. Visualization tools rely on a number of different characteristics to classify, cluster and display results, but formal subject descriptors are certainly among the most powerful. Futuristic’? Yes. Crazy? Possibly, but I say do not throw out the subject headings book or the subject catalogers yet!
NOTES 1. Electronic Journals in the Sciences. http://www.library.brandeis.edu/collections/ SCIEJOURNALSHTML
March 31, 1998.
2. For a full discussion of such research, see Andrew Dillon, Designing Usable Electronic Text: Ergonomic Aspects of Human Information Usage (London; Bristol, PA: Taylor & Francis, 1994).
VOL. 24, No. 2 (SUMMER 1998)
103
3. Thanks to Prof. Candy Schwartz of the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science for pointing me to The Big Picture (sm]: Visual Browsing in Web or non-Web Databases, http:Nwww.public.iastate.edu/ -CYBERSTACKS/BigPic.htm, with links to many of these projects. 4. 3d Bookmarks Generator March ligwww.epfl.ch/-rezzoni/VG/tform.html
31,
1998.
http://
5. GODOT (GopherVR Organized Directories of Titles). March 30, 1998. gopher:/lboombox.micro.umn.edu:70/00/ gopher/Unix/Godot/GODGT%2OvO. 1
Schaffner is Associate Director for Public Services, Brandeis University Libraries, Mailstop 045, Waltham, MA 02454, e-mail:.
IDENTIFICATION OF ELECTRONIC JOURNALS IN THE ONLINE CATALOG
Steve Shadle “Form subdivision may be defined as the extension of a subject heading based on the form or arrangement of the subject matter in the book. In other words, it represents what the book is, rather than what it is about, the subject matter being expressed
by the main heading. “I
When I was first approached to write an article about subject access to electronic journals, I was at a loss about what to write. Libraries generally purchase commercial indexes in order to provide subject access to the journal literature and thus the subject analysis done by serials catalogers tends to be of a more general nature in describing the title instead of the individual article or contribution. As a serials cataloger, I believe that the subject analysis work I do is important to catalog users in general, but not necessarily vital to those users who access the journal literature through commercial indexes. The other contributors to this column undoubtedly will prove me wrong, but other than the fact that there is additional searching functionality within and across electronic journals often provided by the e-journal publisher or distributor, I’m not sure that I see much difference in subject access between print and electronic journals. However, as a partner in the construction of the library catalog, I can envision a time when the remote nature of an electronic journal will be as important a fact as circulation status, location or possibly even bib-
104
SERIALSREVIEW
liographic form (some people would say that time has already come.) With our user groups becoming more “wired,” the ability to identify those resources which are immediately available to the remote catalog user becomes more important. How we choose to inform the user about the remote nature of a resource is still in transition. One of the ways that catalogs traditionally have provided information about bibliographic form is through the use of form subheadings or subdivisions. There is precedent for data structures to be considered a bibliographic form. Since the late 1980s the Library of Congress (LC) has been applying the form subdivision “Databases” to data files and after May 1996 to resources which are actually databases. The database nature of a resource is still considered secondary to other reference formats so that a database which presents itself as an index, directory, bibliography, etc. does not have a “Database” form subdivision applied in addition to the reference form subdivision (something which I find disconcerting because if a user were looking for databases on a particular subject, he should be able to retrieve all databases whether or not they also present themselves as encyclopedias, etc.). LC also has recognized software as a unique bibliographic form and currently uses the subdivision “Software” to identify these titles. However, the case of electronic journals is less straightforward. Although the editors of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) have established “Electronic journals” as a form subheading for “periodicals published and distributed electronically,” the electronic serials instruction in the Subject Cataloging Manual: Subject
Headings:
Subject
Headings
(H1580.5)
instructs the cataloger to use the subdivision “periodicals” for electronic serials. The assumption is that the “electronic” nature of e-journals does not inherently make e-journals a distinct bibliographic form. Therefore, the bibliographic description (as created using AACR2 and USMARC) is sufficient to convey the “e” nature of e-journals. The MARC record is an incredibly rich source of data that second-generation (i.e., post card-production) systems have only just begun to take advantage of. The fact that a publication is an electronic journal is potentially noted in several places in the bibliographic record. A Type of Computer File note (USMARC 5 16) can identify a title as an electronic journal. The Physical Description Fixed Field (USMARC 007) can be used to record the remote nature of the computer file. The General Material Designation (GMD) can identify a resource as a computer file (although not necessarily
- KAREN~ARGILLE-
Karen Cargille, Column Co-Editor
LOST IN CYBERSPACE? ISSUESIN SUBJECTACCESSTO ELECTRONICJOURNALS Edited by Karen Cargille, with contributions
from Ann Schaffner,
Steve Shadle, and Carroll Davis
Cargille is Head, Acquisitions Department, Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, Dept. 0175A, La Jolla, CA 92093-0175
-THEBALANCEPOINT-
As libraries enter into the age when an increasing number of their primary journals are available in electronic format, the challenges of subject access to this information can be handled in a variety of ways. As of the writing of this column, standards have yet to emerge. Some users of libraries see the day that everything will be available electronically and there will be no more need for either libraries or librarians. Those of us involved in acquiring and providing access to the serial literature continue to see an important role for libraries and librarians in helping users find their way through the increasing morass of information available in cyberspace. The Balance Point asked three serialists with an interest in subject access to serials to speculate on problems in providing subject access to electronic journals. Ann Schaffner, associate director for public services at Brandeis University, was asked to take the public services perspective and speculate on the kinds of subject access she would like to see for her faculty and students. Steve Shadle and Carroll Davis are both serials catalogers, from the University of Washington and Columbia University, respectively. They were asked to speculate on some real world solutions to the problem of subject access for electronic journals.
VOL. 24, No.2 (SUMMER~~~~)
101
The three papers exemplify the problem very well. Schaffner describes a possible scenario that partners users and libraries in developing personalized collections and visualization tools. Shadle describes the variety of approaches used by libraries today, and Davis calls for restudy and redefinition of the fundamental categories used in forms cataloging. At this point the solutions are not clear, but the discussions need to continue if libraries are to be able to help keep our users from becoming lost in cyberspace.
LOST IN CYBERSPACE? SUBJECTACCESSTO ELECTRONICJOURNALS Ann Schaffner
At a recent Science Library Faculty Committee meeting at my institution it was not services, staffing, Internet connectivity, or even budget requests that generated the most interest. Instead it was the question raised by one faculty member, “You aren’t going to move the physics journals AGAIN, are you?’ Other faculty members murmured their agreement. What does this have to do with subject access for electronic journals? Everything. Our library, in a somewhat quirky fashion, organizes both current and bound journals in broad subject categories and then alphabetically by title. Faculty members use these arrangements on a daily basis as they browse the collections and follow references. The library had recently undergone a series of renovation projects that required shifting our journals several times. By making these changes we had destroyed the visual cues and intellectual maps of the working collections in their fields. As we move into cyberspace we must make sure that we do not do the same thing to our users. We must not forget the basic human need to organize and visualize information. Our arrangement of volumes on the shelf and our library catalogs have provided such organization in the past. The faculty members’ comments speak for the importance of the physical arrangements of the volumes on the shelf. What of our catalogs? I think it is everyone’s experience that catalogs are most useful in locating known titles from references. Following the trail of references from article to article is a time-worn approach to the literature that is still used by researchers of all types. I once worked on a library instruction session for a professor who wistfully referred to this
102 SERZALSREVIEW
practice as leading to “a life of unending bibliographic frustration!” The usefulness of subject access for journal titles is another matter. We are infrequently asked specifically for a listing of our journal titles in biology or intemational finance. Why should we bother, then, with subject access, either by classification or subject headings? At the Brandeis Science Library our Web page for electronic journals is organized along the same lines as our print collections-by broad subject area and then alphabetically by title.’ Since the Web allows us to provide multiple points of access, we also provide a strict alphabetical listing and a listing by collection, publisher, or “aggregator” when appropriate. It is the broad subject classification, however, which we feel provides the best opportunity for electronic browsing. By mirroring the intellectual and physical organization of our print collections, it gives our users a standard organizing principle and helps them to make the transition from print to electronic journals. Research supports the importance of visual formatting in making sense of information.2 This functions at the page level-we all can recollect the disorientation we experience when viewing a plain text version of an article as opposed to one that is structured and formatted visually. The design and presentation of a well-formatted page helps to clarify the intellectual structure of an article and helps us to remember how to find information later. The same factors apply to journal titles and collections of titles. The organization of volumes on the shelves helps our users to find their way around our collections and recall what they found and where. What happens to these clues in cyberspace? We all have had the experience of following links from websites until we have lost our mental picture of where we started and where we have gone. We need to develop new ways of representing the visual and intellectual structures that represent an individual’s “information space.” Interesting work in this area is being pursued by a number of researchers in information science, and some has been incorporated into contemporary search engines and tools.3 How can we help our users orient themselves in this new electronic world? Publishers are contributing with presentations of electronic journals that include an image of the cover-the visual image helps us to remember and identify the journal at hand. Welldesigned library Web pages with a broad subject organization to facilitate electronic browsing as mentioned above are another good first step. Currently such pages
-KAREN CARGILLE-
are built by adding titles to subject categories as we build Web pages-often duplicating the effort of cataloging. Surely in the future we should be able to create subject-based Web pages from the subject coding in our cataloging records. The library pages could include certain standard subject breakdowns or could be generated dynamically in response to a user’s request. Do our current Library of Congress Subject Headings serve us well in building these kinds of tools? Do our current integrated library systems support the use of our cataloging records in this way? These are the kinds of questions we should consider as we move into the future. While subject collections designed and presented by the library will help our users to bridge the gap from paper to electronic, electronic journal collections can do much more. How many of us have longed for a personal library that includes the research materials that we use most frequently? The paper analog is the small collection of journals and books in a faculty office or lab. Electronic journals allow us to extend this concept-users can create their own collections from among the many e-journals made available to them. Limitations of space and cost to the individual are no longer relevant. In a brilliant move, the designers of Web browsers have incorporated this function into their software with the bookmark capability. Faced with the multitude of resources available to us all, the power and control of selecting and organizing our own resources, whether via an enhanced bookmark system or creating our own Web pages, is compelling. What role might the library play in this scenario? Certainly we will be making the electronic journals and other publications available to our user communities. In addition, we should be providing educational and support services to help our users create effective personal, virtual collections. We all know how quickly one can get in trouble in organizing a subject collection without understanding the role of authority control. We have the skills to provide training that can help our users to avoid these pitfalls. Undergraduate students are leading the way in building these virtual personal collections. In the past some colleges and universities sponsored contests for the best undergraduate book collection-perhaps this concept can be revived in a new way for the electronic collections of the future. In addition to building personalized collections, users now have powerful tools, as mentioned earlier, to build visual representations of “information space” to help them make sense of and navigate a certain body of information. Typically these tools are applied to depicting a Website, a collection of documents (by a given
-THEBALANCEPOINT-
author or presented at a particular conference, for example) or to the results of a subject search. A quick look through some of the work in progress is a truly mind-boggling experience! Documents and their relationships are represented as blobs, webs, graphs, trees, mountains or wheels. Clusters of documents sharing keywords, authors, provenance, subjects or references are visually connected in any number of creative ways. One system takes an individual’s collection of bookmarks and represents it as a three-dimensional space that can be walked through with a virtual reality tool.4 Another takes the results of a 239.50 search and displays the resulting MARC records visually.” Without standards, each of these tools gives a quirky, individualistic view of information-some immediately appeal to us while others may seem off-base, due to our own individual preferences-but they are powerful tools with a great deal of potential. What role might our own subject headings or classification schemes play in building these personalized collections and new visualization tools? At some point the personalized collections may take precedence and libraries will merely provide alternative classification and controlled vocabulary sources for people to use along with the above-mentioned training in the principles of authority control in building their own collections. On the other hand, not everyone wants to invest the time and energy to build and maintain extensive individual collections, and library subject access may supply the basis for tools to automatically generate basic subject collections for individuals to incorporate into their own personalized systems or to modify. Visualization tools rely on a number of different characteristics to classify, cluster and display results, but formal subject descriptors are certainly among the most powerful. Futuristic’? Yes. Crazy? Possibly, but I say do not throw out the subject headings book or the subject catalogers yet!
NOTES 1. Electronic Journals in the Sciences. http://www.library.brandeis.edu/collections/ SCIEJOURNALSHTML
March 31, 1998.
2. For a full discussion of such research, see Andrew Dillon, Designing Usable Electronic Text: Ergonomic Aspects of Human Information Usage (London; Bristol, PA: Taylor & Francis, 1994).
VOL. 24, No. 2 (SUMMER 1998)
103
3. Thanks to Prof. Candy Schwartz of the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science for pointing me to The Big Picture (sm]: Visual Browsing in Web or non-Web Databases, http:Nwww.public.iastate.edu/ -CYBERSTACKS/BigPic.htm, with links to many of these projects. 4. 3d Bookmarks Generator March ligwww.epfl.ch/-rezzoni/VG/tform.html
31,
1998.
http://
5. GODOT (GopherVR Organized Directories of Titles). March 30, 1998. gopher:/lboombox.micro.umn.edu:70/00/ gopher/Unix/Godot/GODGT%2OvO. 1
Schaffner is Associate Director for Public Services, Brandeis University Libraries, Mailstop 045, Waltham, MA 02454, e-mail:
IDENTIFICATION OF ELECTRONIC JOURNALS IN THE ONLINE CATALOG
Steve Shadle “Form subdivision may be defined as the extension of a subject heading based on the form or arrangement of the subject matter in the book. In other words, it represents what the book is, rather than what it is about, the subject matter being expressed
by the main heading. “I
When I was first approached to write an article about subject access to electronic journals, I was at a loss about what to write. Libraries generally purchase commercial indexes in order to provide subject access to the journal literature and thus the subject analysis done by serials catalogers tends to be of a more general nature in describing the title instead of the individual article or contribution. As a serials cataloger, I believe that the subject analysis work I do is important to catalog users in general, but not necessarily vital to those users who access the journal literature through commercial indexes. The other contributors to this column undoubtedly will prove me wrong, but other than the fact that there is additional searching functionality within and across electronic journals often provided by the e-journal publisher or distributor, I’m not sure that I see much difference in subject access between print and electronic journals. However, as a partner in the construction of the library catalog, I can envision a time when the remote nature of an electronic journal will be as important a fact as circulation status, location or possibly even bib-
104
SERIALSREVIEW
liographic form (some people would say that time has already come.) With our user groups becoming more “wired,” the ability to identify those resources which are immediately available to the remote catalog user becomes more important. How we choose to inform the user about the remote nature of a resource is still in transition. One of the ways that catalogs traditionally have provided information about bibliographic form is through the use of form subheadings or subdivisions. There is precedent for data structures to be considered a bibliographic form. Since the late 1980s the Library of Congress (LC) has been applying the form subdivision “Databases” to data files and after May 1996 to resources which are actually databases. The database nature of a resource is still considered secondary to other reference formats so that a database which presents itself as an index, directory, bibliography, etc. does not have a “Database” form subdivision applied in addition to the reference form subdivision (something which I find disconcerting because if a user were looking for databases on a particular subject, he should be able to retrieve all databases whether or not they also present themselves as encyclopedias, etc.). LC also has recognized software as a unique bibliographic form and currently uses the subdivision “Software” to identify these titles. However, the case of electronic journals is less straightforward. Although the editors of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) have established “Electronic journals” as a form subheading for “periodicals published and distributed electronically,” the electronic serials instruction in the Subject Cataloging Manual: Subject
Headings:
Subject
Headings
(H1580.5)
instructs the cataloger to use the subdivision “periodicals” for electronic serials. The assumption is that the “electronic” nature of e-journals does not inherently make e-journals a distinct bibliographic form. Therefore, the bibliographic description (as created using AACR2 and USMARC) is sufficient to convey the “e” nature of e-journals. The MARC record is an incredibly rich source of data that second-generation (i.e., post card-production) systems have only just begun to take advantage of. The fact that a publication is an electronic journal is potentially noted in several places in the bibliographic record. A Type of Computer File note (USMARC 5 16) can identify a title as an electronic journal. The Physical Description Fixed Field (USMARC 007) can be used to record the remote nature of the computer file. The General Material Designation (GMD) can identify a resource as a computer file (although not necessarily
- KAREN~ARGILLE-