A c t i o n f o r L i b r a r i e s — F e b r u a r y 2 0 0 4

Serials Solutions Enhances Services

By Rosario Garza

Many BCR member libraries already take advantage of the tools and services offered by Serials Solutions to help them get the most out of their electronic journal subscriptions. Now Serials Solutions has enhanced the design of its services to help ensure that your valuable electronic resources are not under-used because it is too time-consuming for your staff and too difficult for your patrons to search for a specific full-text journal.

Serials Solutions has renamed its A-to-Z Title List and Journal Linker services. They are now known as E-Journal Access & Management Suite, or E-Journal A.M.S. With the E- Journal A.M.S. service, you can choose from the following options:

E-Journal Portal: provides a single, customized library-branded interface that includes the same accurate data found in a standard HTML report format.
A-to-Z Lists: a comprehensive, searchable list of your library's full-text, electronic format journals in HTML and/or print format.
Journal Linker: enables users to link from an abstract or index to the full-text journal, anywhere in a collection.
Subject Browsing and Title Searching: enables patrons to quickly find and access your library's e-journals by subject, title or ISSN.
Ulrichsweb.com linking: offers bi-directional linking between Serials Solutions' HTML report and www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/.
Data files: can be delivered in a wide variety of formats to suit your needs. The most common requested is Microsoft Excel, but other options include CSV, XML and pipe-delimited formats.

Serials Solutions also offers full MARC Records for electronic journals, which allow libraries to include e-journals in their OPAC. Serials Solutions is able to customize the records to meet each institution's individual needs and work with almost any integrated library system. With full MARC records, patrons use the OPAC to find the library's entire print and electronic journal holdings. The full Marc Record service includes a subscription to E-Journal A.M.S. The Serials Solutions' full Marc Records service uses the CONSER MARC serials records. The records are then supplemented with non- CONSER records, such as those from Gale and Ulrich's. Serials Solutions' staff will also create brief records when no bibliographic records are available for a particular electronic journal.

Serials Solutions' Article Linker is an OpenURL link resolver. As such, it connects all of a library's resources into one easy-to-access collection. An easy-to-use interface ensures that patrons and librarians can take full advantage of OpenURL technology to access full- text or links to extended resources. For librarians, implementation is made easy and can be performed in under a day — all of the data and software for Article Linker is housed on Serials Solutions' servers. This service also includes a subscription to E-Journal A.M.S.

BCR member libraries receive a 20 percent discount when they subscribe to Serials Solutions' services. Additional discounts are available for community college libraries and for multi-year and multiple product subscriptions.

To find out more about the Serials Solutions' services, view sample reports or take a look at how other libraries have implemented this service, visit the Serials Solutions' Web site: www.serialssolutions.com/samples.asp. A list of the databases tracked by Serials Solutions also can be found on the Web site. Interested librarians can request a no-obligation quote by filling out the quote form available at www.serialssolutions.com/rfq.asp. By filling out the quote form you can receive a free trial of Serials Solutions' services.

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