Blueggel, Bruno: The Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek (EZB)
University of Greifswald, Germany

This essay is a short summary of essays written by Dr. Evelinde Hutzler, Universitätsbibliothek Regensburg, about the emerge, the tasks and the future developments of the Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek (EZB) at the library of the University of Regensburg. The quoted essays will be named at the end. Some of them have been published online in the internet, unfortunately only in German until now. 

1. The emerge and tasks of the Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek  
The Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek developed out of a pilot project of the Land Bavaria during the time of 1st of November 1997 and the 31st of March 1999. The University of Regensburg and the library of the Technical University of Munich were
partners. Cooperative administration and offering of e-journals at disposal on a common surface of WebPages was the goal of the project.

Meanwhile the project has become much larger. Over 130 national and foreign libraries become members of the project and contribute more than 8300 titles out of which 900 are purely e-journals. For more than 1900 of these journals there is free access.  

Every participating institution can administrate their licensed journals independently and can add instructions of use. Subscribed journals can be offered as well access-free journals. There are only two conditions about the journals:

1. EZB contains only scientific journals, to guarantee quality.
2. The journals must have full-text-access, not only abstracts.

Modes of access

The EZB contains e-journals with three different user conditions which are marked by particular traffic lights:

	free accession to full text versions for all users in the internet
	full text version only for subscribers of the e-journal ( e.g. members of the library)
	full text version not subscribed for one's own library - but often tables of Contents or abstracts are available or the purchase of the essay is offered

For users there are three ways to find there journals:

1. subject access: These lists are sorted by subject headings given by the cataloging library during the input . 
2. alphabetic access: All are listed in alphabetic order. 
3. search functions: Via tittle, subject heading, ISSN, publisher, . . . 

The three modes of accession can be readjusted according to the user's condition. 

Moreover, there is an interface for suggestions for titles.

For active users there is an administrative function for the admission of a new title to the EZB and another for making available of already registered titles for one's own library. When a title is made available for one's own library it is signaled by the yellow traffic light.

You will find the feed into interface for the accession of a new title to the EZB as a link. Only the bold boxes are mandatory (Title, special field, type, URL, . . .). The subject access is generated by subject field ( "Fachgebiete"). You can give more than one subject heading. All other boxes are optional and can be filled out later.

The adaption of an already existing title for one's own library can be done as follows:

1. step: call e-journal
2. step: Fill in the anchor of the read me file and the URL of the journal

The readme-file will be saved in one's own local web of the libary. It contains directions for the modes of accession, conditions for usage of the publishers, further links to the publishers and information of the library.

If the read me file contains passwords for protected journals, the side shall be saved in the protected Intranet of the library.

The data stock is hold in a relational database. The input and up-date of the data is to be done with the www.-Interface, described before.

The administration-access offers although an statistical-interface, so it is very easy to validate the e-journals-stock of the own library.

An active participating library receives administration rights on this database. It receives the rights to adjust new titles or journals that have been adjusted by other libraries to the Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek.

Since the 70's the journals of the important German libraries have been registered in the journal data base "Zeitschriftendatenbank (ZDB)". They were transmitted from this common data pool into regional library systems and are therefore available in the OPAC's of the libraries ( in addition to the notice in the journal data base). Not only the conventional journals but also the e-journals will be entered (according to the rules for non-book-materials).

In the regional Bavarian Library Network the EZB is taken in as an independent "virtual" library. In this way local holdings can be assigned to it in the regional OPAC. From this local-record a so called frontdoor leads to the EZB. The connection is done by using the ISSN. One can see on the front door page which library has direct access to the wanted journal.

Of course, the URL could also be directly listed in the regional OPAC because the user expects to find all media in the OPAC. So why this roundabout way? Descriptive cataloguing of journals into the Zeitschriftendatenbank is a large-scaled process. Plus the update of the regional network's catalogue with data out of the Zeitschriftendatenbank does not take place in real time. This leads to delays, which are not acceptable with such fast changable media like e-journals. Change of surfers, Consortiums, and changes in the price policy of publishers ask for fast reactions of the libraries. The EZB is by means structered much easier and therefore much more flexible than the journal data base. Changes in the modes of accession can be done fast and without any problems. The input in the catalogue of the Zeitschriftendatenbank does not need to be changed, because the link on the frontdoor does not change, it is an permanent url (phtml).

This concept that has been developed in cooperation with the Bavarian Network meets the following important criterias:

• the securing of the same high standard of cataloguing as for print-journals
• the close cooperation with the common Zeitschriftendatenbank, the journal data base
• through rational technical solutions decrease of the amount of work to be done
• This concept is also applicable to electronic resources with monographic style

1. Planned further development of the Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek

The goals of this project, started in the beginning of the year 2000, and that is sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft (German Research Society), are:

Until now electronic journals are registered by subject classification, subject heading, catchword search on the basis of the title of the journal. That means that until now indexing took place on the level of the titles of the journal rather than on the level of the essays of the journal.

By using the new project this shall be improved. Two different procedures are tested to do so:

• connection of already existing bibliographical data of essays, provided by the publisher, with the title of the journal of the EZB

Therefore a test period of the service of the Institute of Physics Publishing called STACKS was used. Data of 34 e-journals was downloaded via FTP and connected to the data of the EZB through ISSN. Because of this it is possible to search for authors, catchword or title of the essays. At the moment more publishing houses shall be integrated into the project.

• Indexing of essays of the EZB by the use of automatic full text indexing

There is a high amount of e-journals for which there is no structured bibliographical data available. This is especially valid for pure online journals which have been published by non-profit organizations such as universities and special organizations. There is free access to fulltext-versions of these journals. The software packet Harvest, which was developed for the Electronic Library (ELib) of Osnabrück, is being optimized for the EZB for automatic indexing of these full text versions.

Like at the library of the University of Osnabrück, full text indices to single journals will be designed and hold on a server for the EZB. The index data shall also be useful for searches with other services. And again a work sharing cooperation with several partners is visible and expected. In the process of the project for chosen journals test for indexing on different levels will take place. From the homepage of the journal via the table of contents and the abstract to the full text version.

In well structured journals the person searching can decide how far his/her research shall be done. Despite the high amount of work, this process shall be used with often used but rarely indexed journals.

A prototype for the extended search functions for essays in electronic journals has already been shown at the Frankfurter book fair.

Another improvement are transpublishing services. They shall be developed and integrated for active, interest-focused notification of the user about titles of journals and essays.

The first step will be the notification about the titles of the journals. Users of the EZB shall have the option of subject-based information about publications of new titles. In addition to this users of libraries which use the EZB shall have the opportunity to be informed about licensed journals. In the second step the alerting functions will be extended onto the level of essays.

Until now most of the foreign users come from other German -speaking countries. Within the scope of this DFG-project an English interface will be designed to make our services also available to other libraries. It will especially targeted to meet the needs of libraries of Eastern Middle Europe.

Interfaces for the exchange of data shall be designed to make data of other services available and to reduce the amount of work. This refers to the cataloguing in the Zeitschriftendatenbank. An interface from MAB2 to EZB needs to be developed which will offer the possibility of data exchange of bibliographical and local data.

Moreover, another interface for meta data to Dublin Core (DC) shall be developed. Due to the meta data interface the data of the EZB will be available through subject-oriented search machines. Furthermore, a data exchange with CORC (cooperative online Resource Catalog) of OCLC will be possible.

These development will surely offer improvemnets for research and indexing of essays publishes in electronic journals. They have already influenced the development of certain data bases. Silverplatter already allows to use an interface from their CD-Rom data bases (Medline, Biological Abstracts, Modern Language Association etc.) to other stocks such as the EBZ. The connection is established via ISSN. After the research is completed, in the Silverlatter data base by pressing a button a link to EZB is established in case the journal is available in EZB. ( The following example for the Gemeinsamen Bibliotheksverbund (GBV) can be extended analog to the EZB.)