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This article was downloaded by: [Stony Brook University]On: 01 November 2014, At: 19:18Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Journal of Interlibrary Loan, DocumentDelivery & Electronic ReservePublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wild20
Creating an Electronic ToolkitRussell Gladstone MLS a & Veronica Kenausis MLS aa Western Connecticut State University , 181 White Street, Danbury,CT, 06810, USAPublished online: 16 Oct 2008.
To cite this article: Russell Gladstone MLS & Veronica Kenausis MLS (2006) Creating an ElectronicToolkit, Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery & Electronic Reserve, 16:4, 73-83, DOI:10.1300/J474v16n04_08
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/J474v16n04_08
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Creating an Electronic Toolkit:From Discovery to Delivery
Russell GladstoneVeronica Kenausis
SUMMARY. Post secondary academic librarians are uniquely positionedto introduce, train, manage, and support innovative tools like electronicreserves, electronic interlibrary loan with document delivery, and link re-solver solutions that integrate access to discrete internal and external col-lections. Combining these services allowed the library to establish an“Electronic Toolkit”–a suite of electronic utilities that fulfills teaching andessential learning activities. The Toolkit has also brought the library rec-ognition as a campus technology leader. The Toolkit is simply an exten-sion of the high quality, valued-added services that the library has alwaysoffered. doi:10.1300/J474v16n04_08 [Article copies available for a fee fromThe Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address:<[email protected]> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com>© 2006 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]
KEYWORDS. Ariel, interlibrary loan, electronic reserves, ILLiad, linkresolver, LinkSource, Toolkit, Open URL
Russell Gladstone, MLS, is Access Services Librarian/Associate Professor (E-mail:[email protected]); and Veronica Kenausis, MLS, is Electronic Systems Librar-ian/Assistant Professor (E-mail: [email protected]), both at Western ConnecticutState University, 181 White Street, Danbury, CT 06810.
[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: “Creating an Electronic Toolkit: From Discovery to Delivery.” Glad-stone, Russell, and Veronica Kenausis. Co-published simultaneously in Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Docu-ment Delivery & Electronic Reserve (The Haworth Information Press, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc.)Vol. 16, No. 4, 2006, pp. 73-83; and: Marketing and Managing Electronic Reserves (ed: Trevor A. Dawes)The Haworth Information Press, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc., 2006, pp. 73-83. Single or mul-tiple copies of this article are available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service[1-800-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (EST). E-mail address: [email protected]].
http://jildd.haworthpress.com© 2006 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1300/J474v16n04_08 73
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ENVIRONMENT
Western Connecticut State University (WCSU) is part of the Con-necticut State University system and serves approximately 5,000 FTEundergraduate and graduate students. Its primary mission is undergrad-uate education, although the university does offer a doctorate in edu-cation and various masters degrees. Numerous faculty have strongresearch interests, but the university stresses teaching.
The library at WCSU is typical for a mid-size state university, withapproximately 200,000 volumes, nearly 1,000 print journal subscrip-tions, access to over 12,000 full text electronic periodicals through ag-gregated databases, and indexing for another 15,000 periodical titles. In2000, after 12 years of planning and delays, the library physical plantwas doubled in size and completely renovated. As a result, the libraryalso underwent significant library faculty changes that resulted in a newenergy and new possibilities. The confluence of a new building, newstaff, and the renewed enthusiasm of existing staff, made the environ-ment ripe to embrace the work needed to roll out an “ElectronicToolkit” and provide ongoing support for each of the Toolkit elements.
WCSU Library’s Electronic Toolkit is a suite of electronic utilitiesthat work both independently and interdependently to integrate accessto discrete internal and external collections. Items in the Toolkit include(1) an electronic reserves product, (2) an electronic interlibrary loanmanagement system, and (3) an OpenURL-based link resolver. To besuccessful, the planning, implementation, and support of each elementrequired close and collegial collaboration among the stakeholders. TheElectronic Systems Librarian, the Library Systems Assistant, the Ac-cess Services Librarian, Access Services Technical Assistants, Interli-brary Loan Technician, and Technical Assistant were all integral to theprocess. In order to maximize our ability to make these projects work,we engaged in open discussion and strived for central agreements thatwere critical to the smooth coordination of all phases of selection, in-stallation, implementation, and ongoing support and training of end us-ers. A collegial and cooperative atmosphere was essential to see usthrough the numerous obstacles, delays, and impediments we encoun-tered.
TOOLKIT ELEMENT 1: ELECTRONIC RESERVES
The library at WCSU was faced with a challenge to provide out of li-brary and off campus access to course reserve materials. An early at-
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tempt to deliver reserves electronically was made using ‘home grown,in-house’ developed software. The brief experience with this early iter-ation–which entailed significant HTML coding and maintenance–wasnever fully developed and was not robust enough to support the needs ofthe faculty or students. This initial effort never became the vehicle forfull support of an electronic course reserves program, but demand foraccess to curricular materials 24/7, both on and off campus by both fac-ulty and students, continued to grow.
In addition, in 2001, WCSU had few options for faculty memberswho wished to utilize technology to communicate with and provide in-formation to their students. Self-managed web pages were not easilyavailable to most university faculty and there was little training and sup-port available. Therefore, we began to look at the project as a way to notonly modernize our reserve system, but also meet some of the growingcampus demand for an electronic course support system.
In selecting an electronic reserves software solution, we consideredtwo main options: an add-on module for our library management sys-tem, or a stand-alone product. Since WCSU is part of the ConnecticutState University system–four universities plus the state library–thatshares one Innovative Interfaces Inc. (III) Circulation/Serials/Acquisi-tions System, we had some knowledge about the III Millennium MediaManagement module. However, upon close examination, we rejected it,in part, because the management interface seemed overly complex, andthere was no facility to allow the faculty to manage their own content.The library circulation staff would need to manage the entire process.As discussion progressed, the capability for faculty to manage their ownreserves content emerged as a core element of the solution, both fromthe library staff’s and the faculty’s perspective.
ERes from Docutek appeared to fill most of our needs. We felt thatthe library staff, as well as the faculty, would be able to learn to use thesoftware quickly and painlessly. With minimal training, faculty wouldto be able to post material when they wanted. Students would be able toretrieve the posted material in a timely manner and in an easily naviga-ble environment. The more we learned about the Docutek ERes soft-ware, the more convinced we became that the installation, training, andsupport was well within the library’s ability.
ERes is essentially a turn-key system. The Library purchased, and ourcomputing department configured, a server for the product. Docutek thenremotely installed the software and customized it for local use. Ourpreference would have been to run the server in the library itself, but ourcomputing culture on campus did not support this endeavor. Since it is a
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relatively light-weight application–hardly more than a file server–itneeds very little attention and has required very little maintenance. Weanticipate that we may need to remove old files and/or restrict diskspace in the future, but now there is ample storage space.
Docutek was selected, installed, and configured by the fall semester2001. It was rolled out incrementally to give the library support stafftime to get up to speed with the new technology and new procedures.Staff developed new production cycles for establishing user accounts,intake of materials (such as scanning and converting paper documents),and management of course pages. Initially we sought out the facultywho participated in the failed early efforts to provide electronic supportfor reserve materials. As these early adopters began to use ERes, theyspread the word about the ease-of-use to their colleagues.
The introduction of ERes substantially altered the way faculty placeitems on reserve, and the way library staff manages and process reservematerials. Prior to ERes, many faculty submitted large numbers of pa-per copies of articles which were processed into folders and were avail-able only to students coming in to the library to make photocopies. NowERes provides access from anywhere at any time and students can sim-ply print out the material or read it online.
In April 2002, we applied for and received a grant from the Con-necticut Distance Learning Consortium,1 an organization dedicated tosupporting faculty technology development on Connecticut collegecampuses. We proposed to teach faculty how to incorporate electroniccommunication and content delivery tools into their courses. The grantprovided for two, 1.5-day workshops in which faculty would learn howto use and maintain course ERes pages, posting syllabi and other wordprocessing documents, PowerPoint presentations, and linking to aggre-gated database articles.2
The workshops revealed a variety of challenges including support forthe wide range of faculty computer capabilities with hardware and soft-ware and implications for faculty pedagogy. For faculty, rudimentaryconcepts such as network drive space, portable memory, and e-mailwith file attachments needed to be addressed so they could take full ad-vantage of ERes. Mastery of these devices and software are essential forfaculty to build ERes course pages themselves, or to utilize the fullrange of support offered by the library reserve desk staff. Using ERes, alow-threshold application,3 broke a technology barrier for many of theworkshop participants. The extraordinary benefits to the participatingfaculty, who choose to manage, and in many cases create their ownERes course pages, have taken substantial steps to use this technology
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to keep their content timely and relevant. The ability to deliver filebased, web based, multi-media, and other graphics files presents facultywith content options usually reserved for only the most technologicallyadvanced faculty.
ERes currently has approximately 175 faculty accounts (out of a pos-sible 400–including adjuncts); more than 430 active courses are sup-ported, with more than 300 course pages archived over that last 3 years.ERes is flexible enough to provide some administrators, such as the Of-fice of Grants Programs, to post information about funding opportuni-ties to the entire university community. Committees of the UniversitySenate also post current notices of activity and documents that theirmembers need to share with each other. The university established anEd.D. in Educational Leadership last year and the entire 25 student co-hort were trained and provided ERes accounts. They used their ERescourse pages for presentations in their educational technology courses.Their feedback, as well as that of their faculty, let us know that learningto use ERes was very beneficial, and might lead to referrals for potentialadoption in the school districts in which they work.
An additional benefit for our faculty has been an example of true dis-tance education utilization of ERes. A member of our Education andEducational Psychology Department taught several summer courses inChina, to education majors using her content and links on several of herERes course pages. She was able to present entire collections of re-sources to her students virtually, which would have been unavailablegiven this geographic challenge. She was also able to retrieve full textarticles from our university library’s full text database for subjects inwhich her students showed an interest, and post them using PURL linkson her ERes course page with no appreciable time lag for her students.
A faculty member in the Economics Department employed the “visi-bility dates” function for numerous documents to drive his micro-eco-nomics students to read the course material prior to class at a greater ratethan previously. The professor’s comments stated that these summersession students were busy, but even more highly prepared for classthan students in fall or spring terms.
TRAINING
So why does ERes work so well? The learning curve is short, a one(librarian) to one (faculty) training session takes about one hour. In thattime, the librarian will create the faculty level account, and the faculty
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will create at least one ERes course page. The faculty will acquire suffi-cient knowledge and confidence to add material, such as a course sylla-bus, other file based documents, PowerPoint files, as well as build linksto web pages. Teaching faculty work on their course page in real time,and can prepare well in advance of an upcoming term or immediatelyprior to a class session, giving them the time to gather and post material.
The library’s Reserves Desk Staff provides a full range of support,including posting documents, creating links (PURLs)4 to articles fromfull text databases, scanning material to be converted into PDFs, and ar-chiving and restoring course pages. These services allow the faculty thetime to “experiment” with the software and try their hand at creatingcourse web pages. If problems or difficulties arise the support staff canquickly correct the errors on a page so it will display the correct contentor links. Special support was sought by a faculty member in the PhysicsDepartment. He requested that we post the solutions to homework as-signments the day after the class met. This customized support providedthe faculty with control of the content, and provided the students withthe answers that they needed.
TOOLKIT ELEMENT 2: INTERLIBRARY LOAN
After the successful implementation of ERes, the library turned its at-tention to interlibrary loan. As was the case with many ILL depart-ments, we had been incrementally adding services to ILL–starting withonline (home-grown) request forms, adding some back-office manage-ment software (Clio), adopting electronic transmission of files (Ariel),and experimenting with an open-source online document delivery(Prospero). Each of these individual systems filled an important need;but, as interlibrary loan demand increased, the difficulty and complex-ity of using disparate systems became overwhelming. We were strug-gling to maintain productivity levels and collect statistics for local andstate reports. We were concerned that ILL would eventually be buriedby its own labyrinthine systems and processes as well as the seeminglyconstant software and hardware upgrades. We were further concernedthat any change in personnel would leave a tremendous knowledge vac-uum that we may not have been able to fill. We clearly needed anall-in-one management, request, and delivery solution.
The ILL technician, to her credit, had been looking at and learningabout ILLiad (Atlas Systems, Inc.) for several years. She monitored itsdevelopment, and watched the listserv for updates and information. We
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came to understand that this was the only integrated solution on the mar-ket. The Library purchased ILLiad in May 2002 when we were confi-dent that the product had reached an acceptable level of maturity andstability and would meet our staff and user needs. This also happened tocoincide with OCLC’s purchase of distribution rights for the product,giving us greater confidence that we would have the requisite technicalsupport to ensure a more seamless integration into our environment.
To prepare for installation, the library again purchased a server andSQL Server 2000 software through the University’s computing de-partment. The server is also housed in and maintained by IT. Localworkstations were upgraded to ensure the systems would run smoothly.The ILLiad software package includes on-site installation services and,in July 2002, a representative from Atlas Systems came to install thesoftware and perform initial staff training. Although the installation andtraining went relatively smoothly, we proceeded cautiously, rolling outlending first and bringing borrowing in slowly. This turned out to be awise decision since shortly after installation of version 5, there was amajor upgrade to version 6. The training we had received upon installa-tion was nearly useless for the new version of the system. But soon, wewere confident enough with the new system to begin to let go of theother systems we had been using.
We went live in September 2002 with borrowing, after customizingand localizing the web interface for ILLiad. Training for end users wasminimal. We prepared a web page and a handout describing the processand how to manage requests. We ran what might be called a “no-choice”marketing campaign for our interlibrary loan patrons. We encounteredsome substantial resistance at first, mainly from our long-time users andthose who were very comfortable with the familiar, low-tech ILL re-quest cards. We made the decision to go “cold turkey” a semester laterand stopped accepting any cards. There continued to be a smattering ofcomplaints, but most users complied and eventually embraced the newsystem/process.
As our confidence, and our patrons’ comfort, with ILLiad becamemore established, we began to look at the parts of ILLiad that were newto us (thus far we had only used the system for lending and borrowing).The option we were most interested in was electronic delivery of arti-cles via Ariel. A significant amount of time was spent on the phone withOCLC technical support, but we finally introduced web delivery of pe-riodical articles in January of 2003. The service took off immediately.We announced its availability and were amazed at the ease with whichpeople adjusted to electronic delivery. In our announcement, we gave
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users an option between paper delivery and electronic delivery. Elec-tronic delivery became the option of choice for 99% of all users.
Once electronic delivery was fully operational, we investigatedILLiad’s OpenURL component. The professional literature had re-ferred to OpenURL for years, but it only became concrete for us whenwe realized how we could apply it in our own situation. We discoveredwe could build ILLiad request forms into our aggregated databases. Us-ers could simply search a database and if the article was not in full text,the database would offer them an interlibrary loan request form com-pletely filled out with the pertinent bibliographic information. For ashort while, we thought this might be the answer we needed to providethe best service possible to our patrons. At this time, we began to ob-serve a change in our faculty’s habits. They often no longer involved usin obtaining or preparing material for reserve. When they found an arti-cle they needed: (1) they requested it electronically and posted it toERes; or (2) they located it in paper, scanned it, and posted it; or (3) re-quested it on interlibrary loan as a PDF and then posted it to ERes.
Within weeks an issue emerged that created an additional work loadfor the ILL staff. They began receiving numerous requests for items weeither owned in print or on microform or that were accessible from an-other aggregated database. It became obvious that once we gave patronsthe opportunity to request interlibrary loans on-the-spot, we removedany incentive to find the article in another format. Now we had a newproblem. How could we get faculty to use the materials we alreadyowned?
TOOLKIT ELEMENT 3: LINK RESOLVER
Our users were highly satisfied with the two Toolkit elements thus far(ERes and ILLiad). They embraced the convenience of electronic docu-ment delivery and the embedded ILL forms in the databases usingOpenURL. The library staff, however, realized that if we offered ourpatrons interlibrary loan forms embedded in databases, they would takeno further action to find the article in the library. During this time, othermembers of our consortium were actively seeking a journal A-to-Z listand we thought that this might be our solution as well. By providingsuch a product, we would expect that a student or faculty member whosearched a database, and could not find an article in full text in that data-base, they would exit that database, go to the A-to-Z list and subse-quently find the information on the article’s availability. From the start,
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this was an unreasonable expectation, especially given the complexityof the process as well as our embedded ILL form experiment. We con-cluded that patrons would NOT take that interim step and therefore“false” interlibrary loan requests would continue to escalate. As a result,we decided that our problem was not that we lacked a unified list of allour periodicals–both print and electronic–but that we needed to connectour users with appropriate resources wherever those resources were lo-cated. In other words, we needed to (1) link the patron from the citationin one database to the full text in another, or (2) to the print information,or (3) to interlibrary loan form. Once we determined our problem, theanswer was clear: We needed a link resolver.
At this time, the professional literature and market for link resolverswas beginning to change. We had had a demonstration of SFX at leasttwo years prior, but it was well beyond our financial and technicalreach. The start-up costs were estimated at approximately $50,000 andwe would be required to host and configure the server locally and main-tain our own knowledgebase.
By summer 2003, when we began to reconsider a link resolver, newpossibilities were emerging in the market. Possibilities of hosted soft-ware which eliminated the technical and financial stumbling blockswere available. We considered products from Serials Solutions, TDNet,and EBSCO and by late August 2003, we had selected LinkSource fromEBSCO as a good, affordable link resolver with a reliable and familiarmaintenance interface. By September 2003, we had subscribed toLinkSource, and had begun to configure it for our campus.
Since WCSU was one of the first libraries on the east coast to pur-chase LinkSource, our support and customer service during implemen-tation was outstanding. In many ways, the EBSCO representative wasas new to the process as we were. She was curious, interested, intelli-gent, and willing to help. Actual implementation took approximatelythree solid weeks of back and forth e-mails, phone calls, and even acouple of site visits. It involved identifying and configuring all of ouraggregated and special journal collections, tweaking link syntaxes,troubleshooting access problems, and working with the individual data-base vendors to have our resolver appear in the results lists. Once the re-solver was configured, it has required very little maintenance aside fromadding new collections and further refinement of some of the URLs.
Training for LinkSource was a non-issue. We announced its exis-tence on our web pages and explained its purpose. Librarians at the ref-erence desk and in instruction sessions described what the “Click foravailability” link meant in database result lists. We found that a segment
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of our patrons was surprised and delighted with the new options, butthere was a significant segment for which the change was transparent.They simply expected this service. It did not seem new or foreign tothem; it was just something we should have provided all along.
CONCLUSION
Each product we introduced can be considered a success on its own;but taken together, they create a complete Electronic Toolkit, empower-ing both library faculty and faculty with the ability to expand our collec-tive reach to relevant materials and make them available to our users.Each element in the Toolkit provides the utility to make the other ele-ments more productive.
We were gratified that the products were used more creatively andextensively than we anticipated. With ERes, we intended to use only thecore service–library-managed electronic reserves–but it became a cata-lyst for true distance education. Similarly, ILLiad was initially adoptedto streamline the basic ILL process of borrowing, lending, and re-cording of statistics; but it also provided a direct and easy path to themost needed materials as opposed to previous cumbersome systems.LinkSource provided the cohesion necessary to fully realize the poten-tial of ILLiad and, by extension, ERes. This electronic Toolkit is a mile-stone, marking the completion of a cycle that finally fulfills the Internet’spotential for research–from resource discovery to desktop delivery.
The Toolkit continues to transform the way the library staff work, theway faculty and students interact with library materials and services,and the way the library is perceived on campus. WCSU’s environmentis changing, and the library is at the forefront of information technologyinnovation. We continue to investigate and develop new tools that wecan add to the electronic Toolkit, including repository software, digitalcollections, Wikis, RSS feeds, and more. The collaboration between li-brary faculty and faculty will continue to inspire us to look for new andinnovative ways to improve our services.
NOTES
1. http://ctdlc.org.2. We taught them how to include the embedded proxy server so the protected arti-
cles were available remotely.3. “A Low Threshold Application (LTA) is a teaching/learning application of infor-
mation technology that is reliable, accessible, easy to learn, non-intimidating and
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(incrementally) inexpensive. Each LTA has observable positive consequences, andcontributes to important long term changes in teaching and/or learning. . . . the potentialuser (teacher or learner) perceives an LTA as NOT challenging, not intimidating, notrequiring a lot of additional work or new thinking.” From the TLT (Teaching & Learn-ing with Technology) Group website at http://www.tltgroup.org/resources/rltas.html.
4. Persistent Universal Resource Locator.
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