As part of our overall effort to implement a database-driven approach to building the Library's web interface to electronic resources, the CU Ejournals Metadata Project has now implemented browsable lists of ejournals on our LibraryWeb.  Since July 2001 these lists have been generated weekly from CLIO (Columbia's LMS).

Objective: To speed up retrieval for known ejournal titles.

Specific Enhancements:

• New "exact title" search implemented and made default search type.  This is a left-anchored, title phrase, wildcarded search so that users can key in the beginning of a title and retrieve all titles that begin with the requested characters, e.g.,
  
       Title = "journal of the me"
  
  retrieves
  
       Journal of the mechanics and physics of solids (Online)
       Journal of the Medical Library Association (Online)
  
  
• New page length option implemented.  This change allows users to set the number of hits per page to be displayed as the result of a search to 10, 25, 50, 100 or "all listings," e.g., if they wish to scroll through all retrieved titles.  Preliminary default currently set to 50.

Objective: To make the LWEB presentation of ejournals significantly easier and faster to use through interface, navigation & content improvements.

Specific Enhancements:

• Result screen "paging" added (@25 results per page) to reduce lengthy document download times.
  
  
• User display & navigation improved, with the total number of hits displayed, along with the numbers displayed on the current page.
  
  
• Ejournal volume holdings information displayed when available from Serial Solutions.
  
  
• Composite entries provided for ejournals received from more than one vendor, when supplied by Serial Solutions.
  
  
• "More Information" button provides direct link to full CLIO record for that ejournal edition.
  
  
• New "Quick Search" by title or subject keyword available from Ejournal home page & from all result screens, to allow fast lookup where helpful.

1st Quarter 2002 Enhancements

Objective:  To improve technical, operational and development aspects of the ejournals by moving from statically-generated pages to dynamically-generated result screens.

Specific Enhancements:

• Fully dynamic search and retrieval interface implemented, so that new ejournal titles loaded into the MMF are available immediately without lengthy generation of static HTML pages. Real-time queries are run against the DB2/MMF ejournals database.
  
  
• Static HTML backup pages will continued to be generated for backup purposes for some months until we have optimized and fully operationalized the dynamic system.
  
  
• Dynamic queries will make possible the actual search and retrieval of ejournal entries in addition to the current browse approach.