THE ELECTRONIC JOURNALS LIBRARY EZB

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1 Evelinde Hutzler * Universitätsbibliothek Regensburg University Library Regensburg THE ELECTRONIC JOURNALS LIBRARY EZB [ELEKTRONICZNA BIBLIOTEKA CZASOPISM EZB] Abstract: The Electronic Journals Library in German called the Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek, abbreviated to EZB is a cooperative library service for the effective use of scholarly electronic journals. The EZB has been developed and managed by the University Library of Regensburg (Universitätsbibliothek Regensburg) in Germany since Currently the EZB is used by more than 500 libraries in Germany and nine other European countries. The Internet service EZB offers an integrated, cross-publisher platform for the fast and professionally structured use of scholarly e-journals. With more than 48,000 titles, the EZB is the worldwide largest database for e-journals. A special trademark of the EZB is its presentation of access rights using traffic light symbols. This system displays access rights of electronic resources for all member libraries of the EZB. The usage rates reveal that the EZB meets user demands: in 2009 more than 19 million title accesses were counted. The University Library of Regensburg provides the technical and organisational infrastructure of the EZB and is responsible for the further development of this service. All EZB member libraries are working together. They participate by collecting titles and maintaining bibliographic and other metadata which are needed for the access of the e-journals. This international collaboration of all libraries participating in the EZB is one of the main reasons for the success of this service. The EZB also allows decentralized administration and the inclusion of individual access information for licensed journals. Each member library can enter its own access information for each journal title and thus provide their users with the information whether the full texts of the journals are free of charge or licensed by the library. In the last few years, the EZB has been connected to other digital services via XML interface, linking service or data supplies. ELECTRONIC JOURNALS LIBRARY EZB E-JOURNALS INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY COLLABORATION NETWORKING GERMANY Abstrakt: Elektroniczna Biblioteka Czasopism (Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek, w skrócie EZB) jest kooperacyjną usługą biblioteczną świadczoną w celu podniesienia efektywności wykorzystania e-czasopism naukowych. EZB powstała w 1997 r. w Bibliotece Uniwersyteckiej w Regensburgu (Universitätsbibliothek Regensburg) w Niemczech, i ta właśnie placówka do dziś nią zarządza. Z EZB korzysta obecnie ponad 500 bibliotek niemieckich i 9 z innych krajów europejskich. * Dr. EVELINDE HUTZLER, University Library Regensburg, Germany; Head of the User Services Department and responsible for the development and management of Elekronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek, EZB [Electronic Journals Library], PhD in Comupter and Education (University of Regensburg). Two the most important publications: (2008) Bibliotheken gestalten Zukunft. Kooperative Wege zur Digitalen Bibliothek [Libraries Are Shaping the Future. Cooperative Path towards Digital Libraries]. Goettingen: Universitaetsverlag Goettingen, 239 p., available also online at: [co-authors: A. Schroeder, G. Schweikl (Hg.)]; (2006) Electronic Journals Library: A model of International Cooperation. [In:] Y.E. Jianzhong ed. (2006). Advance in Library Information Science. Beijing: Science Press, p Evelinde.Hutzler@bibliothek.uni-regensburg.de [Dr EVELINDE HUTZLER, Universitätsbibliothek Regensburg [Biblioteka Uniwersytecka w Regensburgu, Niemcy], kierownik Działu Usług dla Użytkowników; koordynator ds. rozwoju i zarządzania Elekronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek, EZB [Elektronicznej Biblioteki Czasopism]; doktorat w zakresie zastosowań informatyki w edukacji. Dwie najważniejsze publikacje: (2008) Bibliotheken gestalten Zukunft. Kooperative Wege zur Digitalen Bibliothek [Biblioteki kształtują przyszłość. Współpraca na rzecz bibliotek cyfrowych]. Goettingen: Universitaetsverlag Goettingen, 239 p., dostępne także online: [współaut.: A. Schroeder, G. Schweikl (Hg.)]; (2006) Electronic Journals Library: A model of International Cooperation [Elektroniczna Biblioteka Czasopism. Model współpracy międzynarodowej]. [In:] Y.E. Jianzhong ed. (2006). Advance in Library Information Science. Beijing: Science Press, p Evelinde.Hutzler@bibliothek.uni-regensburg.de] 337

2 Internetowy serwis EZB pełni rolę zintegrowanej platformy oferującej szybki i wspomagany profesjonalnymi narzędziami dostęp do ponad tytułów elektronicznych czasopism naukowych należących do różnych wydawców. Jest największą bazą zawartości e-czasopism na świecie. Znakiem rozpoznawczym EZB jest stosowanie kolorów sygnalizacji drogowej dla określenia dostępności artykułów: system automatycznie wyświetla odpowiednie oznaczenie dla każdej logującej się biblioteki członkowskiej. Pomiary ruchu w witrynie wskazują, że EZB wychodzi naprzeciw potrzebom swoich użytkowników: w roku 2009 zarejestrowano ponad 19 milionów odsłon artykułów. Biblioteka Uniwersytecka w Regensburgu zapewnia techniczne i organizacyjne zaplecze EZB, jak również odpowiada za dalszy rozwój usługi. Wszystkie biblioteki, które przystąpiły do EZB, współpracują ze sobą i wnoszą do projektu własny udział: pozyskują kolejne tytuły i opracowują metadane bibliograficzne (i nie tylko) niezbędne do zapewnienia dostępu do e-czasopism. Ta właśnie międzynarodowa współpraca jest jednym z kluczowych czynników sukcesu Elektronicznej Biblioteki Czasopism. EZB umożliwia ponadto zdecentralizowane zarządzanie licencjami oraz dodawanie informacji o indywidualnych prawach dostępu do opisów subskrybowanych czasopism komercyjnych. Każda biblioteka członkowska może wprowadzić do rekordu danego periodyku informacje o trybie dostępu, dzięki czemu jej użytkownicy dowiadują się, które zasoby pełnotekstowe są im proponowane bezpłatnie, które zaś obejmuje licencja. W ostatnich latach EZB została połączona za pośrednictwem interfejsu XML z innymi elektronicznymi serwisami typu cross-reference i serwisami dostawców piśmiennictwa naukowego. ELEKTRONICZNA BIBLIOTEKA CZASOPISM EZB E-CZASOPISMA MIĘDZYNARODOWA WSPÓŁPRACA BIBLIOTEK NIEMCY SIECI BIBLIOTECZNE * * * 1. WHAT THE EZB OFFERS FOR USERS In the year 1997, the University Library of Regensburg launched the Electronic Journals Library [EZB, online] and has continuously been developing its services [Hutzler 2008]. At the present time (March 2010), the EZB is used by more than 500 libraries in Germany and several other European countries. Even the world s largest library, the Library of Congress, is one of the partners of the EZB community [Panzera / Hutzler 2004]. The EZB is a cooperative library service for the effective use of scholarly electronic journals. It offers free e-journals together with licensed ones under one standardized user interface. However, the EZB itself does not store any electronic journal content; instead, the participating institutions collect bibliographic data pertaining to the journals and record them in the central database in Regensburg. EZB title content The Electronic Journals Library comprises scholarly and academic e-journals which provide full-text articles on the Internet, covering all subjects and spanning all publishers and vendors. At present (March 2010), the EZB contains more than 48,000 titles. Additionally about 60,000 full-text journals from aggregators are included. About 24,000 journals offer their full-text articles for free. The EZB offers a single point for accessing e- journals. This means that all titles are presented in a single standardized user interface (in German and English). Browsing Functions The titles entered in the EZB can be displayed in alphabetical order or in subject lists. A list of all subjects gives the primary information on all e-journals. This overview shows how many titles are available for each subject. The respective subject lists show the journal titles in alphabetical order. Geography e.g. contains more than 600 titles. A click on the journal title leads directly to the journal homepage, and if it is on subscription or for free, the full-text article can be accessed. 338

3 Access information It is very important for users to have information about the availability of full-texts. Therefore we created a traffic light symbol, which shows the accessibility of each title. A green light marks free e-journals: the fulltexts of these journals are freely available. A yellow light denotes titles which are licensed at the library; fulltexts can be accessed by its institutional users. A red light stands for journals without a subscription by the EZB member library. In these cases, full-text access is not possible by its institutional users. Usually, table of contents and sometimes even abstracts are freely available. A yellow/red light means that the EZB member library has no continuous subscription on the journal, and only some of the published volumes are accessible as full-texts for the users of this library. Search Functions In addition to the browsing functions, searching particular journal titles is possible as well. The EZB offers search possibilities for title keywords, publishers and ISSN. Furthermore, users may create a combined alphabetical list of journals belonging to various selected subjects. The search can be restricted to free and/or licensed titles only and users can search for new entries by means of a date search. Detailed title information A click on the information symbol beneath each journal title leads to detailed information about a journal, e.g. about the publisher, the type of journal or the access rights. The licensed titles have an additional readme link. A click on this link provides further information regarding access and use. This readme information is provided by each EZB member and stored on its web server. 2. EZB USAGE In order to quantify the utilisation of the EZB, the University Library of Regensburg counts the journal accesses via the EZB. The access figures clearly show that the EZB is an intensely used service. The number of accesses has been rising steadily for years. In the year 2009 we could register more than 19 million title clicks in total, i.e. approximately journal accesses per day. These access figures indicate user satisfaction with the EZB. The intensive use of the EZB speaks for the high quality of this service. There are three main reasons for the EZB s great popularity among users: The EZB is the world-wide largest database for academic and scholarly e-journals. The journal data and access information are constantly updated and kept up-to-date. Using the EZB is easy and users can see at a glance if they can access the full text articles of the requested journal. 3. THE EZB AS TOOL FOR COLLABORATING LIBRARIES The EZB is not only a user service, but also an efficient tool for the participating libraries. As mentioned before, the EZB is a cooperatively organized service. More than 500 libraries are taking part in the EZB and offer the EZB as their own user service by integrating their local settings. 339

4 To enable a collaborative e-journal management, the University Library of Regensburg created a technical system that allows all EZB members to work together and to adapt the EZB to their local requirements. Although the meta-data of the journals are stored centrally in a database in Regensburg, they are entered and updated in decentralized form by all participants with the help of easy-to-use Web forms. As all EZB members jointly contribute to the EZB, they save time by not having to enter and maintain all journals themselves. At the same time, they can check the other libraries access rights to all electronic journals and provide this information to their customers. Each participating library can mark the journal entries with yellow or red lights according to the library s licences. If an EZB member library has signed licence contracts, it can allocate the respective yellow lights in its EZB interface and thus show its users that they can retrieve the full-texts of these journals. In addition, partner libraries can show their own specific access conditions and give further user instructions in the readme pages. If applicable, they may also link to a special URL offering full-text access for the respective institution in case it differs from the official journal homepage. With this possibility of adapting the EZB to local conditions, participating institutions can use the EZB as local digital library and offer it to their users as their own service. All member libraries have the right to enter new titles into the EZB or to change the shared data of title entries. This procedure has a great advantage for the update process of the frequently changing internet addresses of the journals. If a member library adjusts a journal URL that has changed, this adjustment is automatically valid for all other EZB members. By this direct co-operation of all member libraries the journal URLs are kept up-to-date, so that access to the e-journals is constantly guaranteed for our users. An automatic link check of the EZB revising the URLs periodically is supporting the up-to-dateness of the journal URLs. The EZB member libraries also co-operate in collecting open access journals and in marking them as freely accessible. Because of the international collaboration of the participating libraries, the EZB can offer a very large collection of scholarly e-journals with a huge quantity of freely available titles. Besides, the more libraries participate in the maintenance of this information, the better we can verify the access information especially of free titles over time. It goes without saying that we offer our users the possibility to draw our attention to missing e-journals or to incorrect details in the EZB (e.g. the accessibility of full text articles). User feedback adds to a continuous quality improvement of our service. 4. BENEFITS OF INTER-LIBRARY COLLABORATION The cooperative structure of the EZB offers several advantages. It promotes efficiency through division of labour, because e-journals do not have to be collected and catalogued by each library. Therefore, the EZB member libraries can save time and work. The EZB works very economically, because it bundles up personnel deployment in the more than 500 EZB participant libraries efficiently. The titles of the EZB must only be entered once to be maintained and not several times by the participant facilities. The frequently changing Internet addresses of e-journals are supported by a technical procedure which allows cooperative updating, thus facilitating work for each individual institution. By means of well-structured licence management, locally available access rights can be stored very simply and with a relatively low amount of work and presented to the users. The cooperation of so many partners is also a guarantee of the high quality and topicality of the EZB. This has benefits for 340

5 the users. They appreciate the great extent and the high quality of the EZB database. Furthermore, the cooperation in the EZB promotes the exchange of experience and knowledge between the partners. The University Library of Regensburg runs a closed mailing list for the EZB participants, in which they can exchange information and their experiences with e-journal management. In addition, a direct exchange of views takes place in the annual EZB participants' conference. In summary, there are several benefits of inter-library collaboration in the EZB: high degree of labour saving through collaboration of all EZB member libraries, assurance of the high quality of the EZB by the cooperative collection of the titles and common maintenance of the data, easy-to-use administrative functions for the management of journals which are free-of-charge or under licence, adaptability of the EZB usere interface to local needs, exchange of information and experience among EZB partners. 5. FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF THE EZB BY NETWORKING The EZB is not only used as local library service in the more than 500 member libraries. It is also connected to other library services or digital libraries in numerous ways. One possibility of connecting services to the EZB is the XML interface provided by the EZB. Using the XML interface, libraries or other service providers such as Virtual Specialised Libraries or library portals can embed the EZB into their systems as a modular component for the comfortable use of electronic journals. The EZB as a component of other digital services An example can serve to illustrate how the EZB may be integrated as a module of complex services. The EZB is embedded into some virtual specialised libraries, e.g. into the virtual specialised library for geosciences, mining, geography and thematic maps, called GEO-LEO [GEO-LEO, online]. GEO-LEO offers the possibility to browse through electronic journals via EZB. It provides a list of electronic journals from the field of geosciences, which is supplied by the EZB. Additionally, users get information about licences and access conditions specific to their current IP address, if they are logged in from a university that is a partner of the EZB. The benefits of integrating the EZB as a module are obvious. The journals metadata is supplied by the EZB, where it is maintained and administrated cooperatively by all EZB partner libraries. As the EZB is integrated into the Virtual Specialised Library, the users of this platform may use it without switching from one interface to another. The local licences and access conditions for electronic journals are automatically displayed in the systems of the partner services. The only precondition is that EZB partners administrate their local licenses in the EZB system and store their IP address range. This type of interfacing with the EZB is used by a number of virtual specialised libraries, disciplinary portals, and library portals. Connecting to the EZB via the EZB linking service A different way of linking up with the EZB is the EZB linking service, which has been provided by the University Library of Regensburg for a couple of years. Based upon the open URL technology, the EZB linking service offers to the user direct access to the full text being published in a scholarly e-journal, especially by the 341

6 means of article linking. As an integrated component of partner systems, the EZB linking service detects the availability of e-journals, and provides a link to the journals contents. The EZB linking service is used by different information systems, e.g. scholarly internet portals or literature databases. The EZB linking service e.g. is embedded in MEDPILOT [MEDPILOT, online], an internet portal for medicine. If users search in MEDPILOT they get result lists with EZB links, illustrated by small traffic lights that indicate articles from electronic journals. By clicking on the EZB link, users of MEDPILOT get to an EZB webpage that displays information about the availability of the article. Detailed information about the accessibility of the article for EZB partner libraries is given. It shows with the help of the traffic light symbol if the full-text of the article is accessible without charge, or if it may be used under the license of an EZB member library. Finally, the EZB leads the user to the full-text from a supplier to which access rights are locally available. In order to facilitate the user's access to the full-text, the EZB provides a direct link to the desired articles whenever possible. This is applicable for 18,500 journals of more than 40 publishing houses or suppliers. Additionally, the EZB has implemented links to articles of about 55,000 journals from aggregators (e.g. EBSCO, Proquest). If the EZB cannot link to an article directly, users are being referred to the next higher level, to the journal issue or the homepage of the journal. EZB partner libraries do not need to invest extra work to link to the EZB. Through IP recognition, access rights are automatically assigned by the EZB linking service (if the IP range for the respective institution has been defined). This means that journals licensed by the EZB partners are automatically displayed on the platforms of digital service providers using the EZB linking service. At the present moment this are about 40 services or thematically specialised internet portals. Offering the direct article linking, the EZB could create an additional access to full texts of e-journals for the users of other digital information services and therefore enhance the utilisation of e-journals as a whole. Networking through data supplies from the EZB Finally, the EZB is connected to other systems via data supplies. The EZB allows downloading and using data related to e-journals primarily information about licences and access conditions. One possibility for EZB partners is to create lists of licensed journals with the respective licence periods, and use them in different services that control the EZB links or link to journal contents. Among others, this is used by Google Scholar or for commercial link resolvers. 6. CONCLUSION In summary, one can say that the high usage of the Electronic Journals Library shows that the EZB is a successful model for international cooperation. The cooperation has been working for many years now and has constantly been enhanced. Therefore, not only the number of member libraries has constantly risen, but also the process of networking has proceeded. The large number of EZB member libraries is a good basis to keep up the high quality of the EZB. The University Library of Regensburg will continue to promote the international cooperation, to improve the services of the EZB in cooperation with our partner libraries, and to meet the needs of our partner institutions and users. The Electronic Journals Library EZB can be accessed on the internet for free at: 342

7 Contact Dr. Evelinde Hutzler Universitätsbibliothek Regensburg (University Library of Regensburg) Regensburg Germany Tel: REFERENCES EZB. [visited: ]. GEO-LEO. [visited: ]. Hutzler, E. (2003). The Electronic Journals Library EZB, Report. Online Information Conference, London, p Hutzler, E. (2008). 10 Jahre Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek Kontinuität und Wandel einer kooperativen Dienstleistung. Bibliotheksdienst 42.Jg (2), p Hutzler, E.; G. Schupfner (2002). The Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek: A Successful Library Service for Electronic Journals in Germany. The Serials Librarian 41(3/4), p MEDPILOT. [visited: ]. Panzera, D.; E. Hutzler (2004). E-Journal Access through International Cooperation: Library of Congress and the Electronic Journals Library EZB. Serials Review 30(3), p