In responding to the question asked, “When will these titles appear in the Library Catalogue and the Journals lists?” (see Gale Additions) a bigger question arose: “Should all Academic OneFile (AOF) titles or just selected titles be added to the Catalogue?”
Current situation
General OneFile (GOF) has 6817 full titles available via Serials Solutions and Academic OneFile (AOF) has 5322 titles. In order to minimise numbers of titles common to multiple databases, we currently have titles from the subsets of GOF, Expanded Academic Index (2622) and LegalTrac (229) in the Catalogue and the Journals page. The entire content of GOF is available in 360 Search.
We are reluctant to include both AOF and GOF titles in the Catalogue because of the holding overlap (journals available in more than one database) with our other resources. AOF and GOF combined have a 61% overlap, i.e., percentage of holdings overlapped by at least one other holding from another database. However, AOF has more scholarly journal content (67%) and has 1653 unique titles (titles not available in other databases).
Comparisons
Titles available in AOF and Expanded Academic Index (EAI):
• academic journals – AOF 12,000 EAI 4,500
• full-text journals – AOF 5,000 EAI 2,600
• peer-reviewed journals – AOF 7,300 EAI 3,000
Options
We need to assess the following options:
• remove EAI and LT titles and replace with AOF titles
• add all AOF titles
• add only unique titles from AOF
Title lists
AOF brochure (PDF)
Please let us have your comments.
Deirdre
Add all – otherwise who knows what is where. The users have enough trouble finding things as it is without us being inconsistent as to what is included/excluded. If we have access to it then it should be included in the catalogue.
Have other people also noted that different providers sometimes provide different content for the same publication – for example you may get some articles but not others.
This is often to do with rights to articles. An article will not appear in a database other than the sanctioned one if the copyright holder does not allow it.
Deirdre
Understood – and all the more reason to include all providers in the catalogue!
I’m a late comer to the comments, but I agree with Adam. If we have access through a Library subscription, it should be in the catalogue. The same goes for e-book collections. It’s too much to expect people to check the catalogue AND individual databases. I expect this makes for a lot of cataloguing work but if we want people to use e-books & journals we have to make them visible, and if we want people to use the catalogue, it has to be comprehensive. – Meg
Interloans would like to request that all the unique titles are added to the catalogue. Extra work I know but We feel it would be worth it for users and for staff. Janice
Is there an outcome to this one? Are all to be added?
Assuming this does not create duplicate records then I think we should load all the titles. It is not a large increase in bib records. Anne
Unique titles from AOF have been added to the Catalogue. We didn’t add the whole lot as there were just too many duplicated links.
Deirdre