Trying to make sense of article linking software

I can’t help but reminisce a bit about the old days, when I actually had to search indexes and read abstracts and then go hunt the article down – inevitably, it was on a roll of microfilm or piece of microfiche. I remember when I received my interlibrary loans in 8.5 x 11 manila envelopes rather than e-mail. It’s these experiences that make me think that article linking services – such as Link360 by Serials Solutions, which is what we have at MPOW – are really cool.

But, you know, I’m not exactly the target user. The other day I came across a blog post on LiveJournal from someone complaining about how our article linker never works. I’m still working with her to try to figure out exactly what the problem is, but I have been reflecting on what we can do to make our article linker pages more clear. This seems especially important as we’ve recently signed on with Serials Solutions’ Summon product.

The way I see it, the article linker should always work – it should either point a user to an article we have in a full text database, tell a user we have the article in print and how s/he can retrieve it, or tell the user how s/he can request a copy of the article be e-mailed to him or her. I can foresee two “unsatisfactory” endings: (1) the link doesn’t work. This would, of course, be the content provider’s fault, and we’d need to fix that. (2) The student doesn’t have time to wait for the article to be e-mailed. S/he should go back to the place s/he was originally searching and look for another article.

So, my challenge is how I can make this clearer to the user by configuring Link360. Here’s what it looks like now.

This is what users currently see when they come across an article we have in full text. Click on the image to see the full size.

This is what users currently see when we have an article in print, but not online. Click on the image to see the full size.

This is what users currently see when we don’t have an article at all (or our print subscription has been cancelled). Click on the image to see the full size.

I don’t have too much of a problem with the first screen, except for the matter of duplicate entries from the same content provider (as you can see, it links to both Academic OneFile and General OneFile – that’s unnecessary). From what I’ve read in the Link360 documentation, this should be an easy fix.

The second screen, however, is a problem – in part because the text is misleading, saying that the full text is available through that link. It’s really not. Furthermore, there’s a lot of legwork involved in moving from a catalog record to actually finding the text of an article, and we don’t provide guidance on how to do that. I’m planning to create a screencast to help users do that legwork.

There’s another sticky problem with our print holdings. We have 3 major locations (4, really, but one doesn’t circulate anything), all of which have print journal holdings. Our journals don’t circulate – which means they also don’t travel from location to location (like our books do). So you can really only find a print journal at your present location. That said, we can’t assume that just because someone is at one location, that s/he is unwilling or unable to go to a different location to get that article. An example: a user comes to Zumberge Library, which is on the university’s main campus in Allendale. She searches our databases and finds an article that we have in print. Say that journal is in our automated storage system at Steelcase Library, which is on the university’s downtown campus in Grand Rapids. It’s entirely possible that our user has a class downtown tonight, and could stop at Steelcase and photocopy the article before or after her class. The location issue is just too nuanced to filter out with technology, so that means we have to find another way to help our users self-select the appropriate option. I see this as something to put in the video – one of the first things, actually. If a user can’t make it to the location that holds the article s/he needs, we can scan and e-mail that article to him or her.

Here’s what I’m envisioning for this second screen. Click on the image to see the full size:

Unfortunately, we can’t do this. From what I could deduce from the documentation, Serials Solutions doesn’t allow you to define more than two options for the results page – a “success” and a “failure.” So, essentially, we have to decide whether we want to treat print as a success or a failure. In the mock-up above, I’d like it to be a success, but it makes more sense to treat it as a failure – I want the first option for our students to be that we e-mail them a copy of something we have in print. Here’s a rather rough mockup of what I think we can make it look like. As always, click on the image to see the full size.

I’m rather new to working with Serials Solutions and Link360. If you have any thoughts or advice, I’d definitely welcome it.