Endeavor Information Systems, Inc. has announced free, full access
to ScienceDirect Web editions for Voyager customers. Endeavor’s free offering
of access to the full-text articles of 1,200 Elsevier electronic scientific,
technical, and medical (STM) journals enables customers to supply integrated
access through their Voyager systems. Endeavor’s provision of Web editions
is the first joint project with Elsevier Science since its merger last
year with the publisher. Endeavor has also announced that two Stanford
University libraries—the Lane Medical Library and the Jackson Business
Library—have selected the Voyager integrated library management system.
Web Editions
Linking to ScienceDirect Web editions is one more step in Endeavor’s
“content over Voyager,” a strategic initiative to provide access to all
types of data, including electronic journal content, through the local
library system. This project furthers Endeavor’s pledge to provide access
to information regardless of location or format, and marks the first time
Elsevier Science content will be available through a library OPAC interface.
Journal and article-level access to ScienceDirect Web editions gives
Voyager customers access to abstracts and citations for all articles in
Elsevier journals at no cost. Voyager libraries can “click through” to
electronic full text of articles for 1 rolling year of the library’s subscribed
Elsevier journals.
Libraries with the license for Endeavor’s Citation Server module also
have an automatic check of the local library holdings for the journal.
Even if the library doesn’t have Citation Server, it will have access to
the citations and abstracts as a no-cost reference database, as well as
direct access to the full-text electronic content for their journals. The
Endeavor-housed citation database is updated weekly to include the most
recent articles available from ScienceDirect.
“Libraries are addressing the idea of full content and asking how they
can coordinate the delivery of this information,” said Verne Coppi, Endeavor’s
vice president of development. “End-users want organized, easy, consistent
access to reference information—the Web-based Voyager system delivers the
information to the end-user in a familiar format. For academic and re-search
libraries, this is smart packaging of Elsevier’s essential content with
the familiar Endeavor technology and expertise to provide access on an
ongoing basis.”
“Our customers continually ask for two things: more convergence of systems
and offerings, and a single point of access to all kinds of content,” said
Jane Burke, Endeavor’s president and CEO. “With Web editions available
to all Endeavor customers, both patrons and staff are empowered with easy,
organized access to information. The real benefit is this huge variety
of information is all available to the user through the single access point
of the Voyager user interface.”
To obtain information on how to access Web editions through Voyager,
Endeavor customers should use the clickthrough license agreement located
on Endeavor’s customer-only Web site.
According to the announcement, ScienceDirect is the world’s most comprehensive
full-text scientific database, providing researchers and librarians in
academia and corporations with electronic access to nearly 1,200 STM journals.
At its core, ScienceDirect content includes 1,100 journals from Elsevier
Science as well as other STM publishers and an expanding suite of secondary
databases, including Elsevier BIOBASE, EMBASE, FLUIDEX, Geobase, Ocean-Base,
World Textiles, Ei’s Compendex, Beilstein Abstracts, BIOTECHNOBASE, BIOSIS
Previews, and INSPEC.
ScienceDirect is a unit of Elsevier Science (http://www.elsevier.com)
and part of the Reed Elsevier, plc group, a provider of information to
the STM, legal, and business communities. Visit http://www.sciencedirect.com
for more information.
Stanford Libraries
“We looked at several different systems, but we think that Endeavor
can best meet our library system requirements while also helping to support
other strategic initiatives within our respective professional schools,”
said Shirley Hallblade, director of Stanford’s Jackson Business Library.
“We like Endeavor’s focus on the needs of academic and research libraries,
and are challenged by the opportunities we see for shared development of
new solutions to library issues. As a joint Lane-Jackson purchase, Voyager’s
functionality could best accommodate bringing our two separate libraries
together like this— most right out of the box.”
Many of [our] requirements … were beyond [that of] a typical integrated
library system. Endeavor saw solutions to our problems with existing software,
reducing the amount of customization needed with the implementation,” said
Dick Miller, head of technical services and systems librarian at the Lane
Medical Library.
“We work in a complex environment and need to restrict digital access
by various user groups,” Miller said, noting that Lane Medical Library
has over 800 electronic journals linked into the catalog. “We wanted to
standardize on a UNIX platform and the Oracle database manager. Having
this industry-standard infrastructure and an open-system architecture is
very important for efficient management, and provides sufficient flexibility
to support related local initiatives. Endeavor’s APIs [application program
interface] and SQL [structured query language] make us comfortable that
we can access our data much more efficiently than at present.”
Source: Endeavor Information Systems, Inc., Des Plaines, IL, 800/762-6300,
847/ 296-2200; http://www.endinfosys.com. |
