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Knowledge Bases and Related Tools (KBART) is a project concerned with the optimal implementation of the OpenURL specification. As a collaborative effort between the United Kingdom Serials Group (UKSG) and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and co-chaired by presenter Peter McCracken, its goal is to establish best practices to be used by content providers, aggregators, electronic resource management (ERM) system vendors, and libraries. Their concerted efforts are ultimately there to improve access to electronic resources for the end user, that is, the library patron. The KBART working group is identifying and pointing out problems in the use of OpenURL to those who provide the data and is further engaged in education and advocacy to assist the involved parties in finding solutions to those problems. A report is in progress that includes best practice recommendations on what type of data to provide and how to deliver the data. There are also topics under discussion related to error reporting, the methods of educating the involved parties, and how to incorporate the specific needs of individual libraries. The report to be delivered by the KBART working group is well under way but remains at the same time open for discussion and future input. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a survey of U.S. academic libraries that was conducted in the spring of 2008 to determine if and how academic libraries were actively cataloging e-journals in the age of the OpenURL, A-Z journal lists, and the batch loading of purchased MARC records. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge Bases and Related Tools (KBART) is a joint project between the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the UK Serials Group (UKSG) that is now underway with a focus on improving the functioning of OpenURL by providing standards for the quality and timeliness of data provided by publishers to knowledgebases. In this presentation Peter McCracken, Co-founder of Serials Solutions, provided an overview of KBART and discussed the future plans of this new initiative. A major goal of KBART is to develop a best practices guide that can be used by content providers as they focus on quality control as it relates to the data they provide to the knowledgebase. By bringing together librarians, publishers, aggregators, and e-resource and access management services (ERAMS) vendors the hope is that the real beneficiaries will be library patrons. Several problems that impact the ability of users to get to full-text content include OpenURL data errors and syntax errors. Peter provided an overview of the problems facing library patrons, the various factors that can lead to errors in the knowledgebase and what the KBART project may be able to do to contribute to better data for everyone. The various groups are meeting monthly and presentations are planned at several national-level conferences. KBART will be successful if it results in better data for everyone including those who provide it, those who process it, those who present it, and those who use it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creation and widespread adoption of the OpenURL standard has improved the visibility, and therefore the usage, of libraries' online holdings, although there are some times when OpenURLs fail to resolve. To better understand why problems occur and encourage network-level solutions, librarians at Cornell University have begun working on a study of OpenURL metadata quality. Their goal is to create a systematic approach to assessing and validating metadata quality so that libraries and content providers may collaborate on solutions for metadata problems. One member of this project team, Glen Wiley, shared details about the types of problems this approach seeks to remedy and the status of the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LibX (http://libx.org/) is an open source Firefox extension that provides direct access to library resources in multiple ways: through a toolbar, a context menu, and via cues that LibX places into web sites a user visits. A LibX edition integrates support for the resources to which a particular user community has access, including the library OPAC, databases, and their OpenURL link resolver. As one of its features, LibX supports the fast (one-click) retrieval of known items. such as research articles. This frequent task is automated by exploiting Google's Scholar service as a hidden backend that is used for searches. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of LibX in retrieving known items that were listed as references in a sample of articles in four widely read journals. We conclude that LibX's matching algorithm can lead the user to an accessible copy of an item on average in 81% of cases with a negligible number of irrelevant items retrieved. As a result, LibX can dramatically reduce the time spent on known item searches [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In late 2002 and early 2003, the Serials and Electronic Resources Department of The Ohio State University Libraries collected for correction a total of 864 nonfunctional URLs in bibliographic records for electronic resources on subscription. This paper identifies the types of errors found and reports the proportion of success versus failure to correct the URLs and restore access to the affected titles. Of the URLs examined, 54% were from .gov websites, with the remainder evenly distributed between .edu, .org, .com, and other websites. The high proportion of nonfunctional government (.gov) URLs may be due to the period of collections and might have been affected by the September 11, 2001 attack. Overall, 15% of the affected URLs ultimately did not require changes; 70% required some type of correction; and 14% could not be corrected (percentages are rounded). The article concludes with a discussion of policy implications for review and ongoing maintenance of URLs in the library's online catalog. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]