The Library Web Site
http://library.brooklyn.cuny.edu/
The Library Web site represents one-stop-shopping for access to 15,000-plus digital journals and reference resources, instructions for proxy server access, links to online tutorials in research and writing, and a list of all Brooklyn College Web-based courses on which students can click and link. In the spring semester 2003 Alex Rudshteyn's programmers are busy revising the site to improve the ease with which users access information resources
A marvelous new tool, E-Journals Finder, a database of full-text electronic journals http://dewey.brooklyn.cuny.edu/eFinder/, is now in full production and mounted on the Library Web site.
History : For more than a year reference librarian and subject specialist Martha Corpus worked very hard to develop a unified list of all the e-journals Brooklyn College receives. This list, constantly changing as vendor/aggregators change the contents of their packages, is now updated using tapes supplied by Serials Solutions http://www.serialssolutions.com/. At first, Professor Corpus also attempted to assign broad subject headings to each journal title, headings designed to correspond to the College's academic department so that readers would know which subject specialist to consult if they had a question about content. While this idea certainly had merit, it failed in execution: there are many thousands of titles, and Professor Corpus was only able to assign subject headings to a small number of them.
Method : The chief librarian gave Technical Services (the classification experts) the task of assigning subject headings to the 15,000 e-journal titles, an enormous project to be overseen by Associate Librarian Judith Wild. This work is performed by the Cataloging unit, with assistance from Serials staff. Jim Cai wrote the program that facilitates the transfer of Library of Congress subject headings into the E-Journals Finder.
Results : To date, 15,000 titles in the E-Journals Finder now have subject access, an enormous achievement.
A second database (in development) will integrate with the E-Journals Finder, providing subject access to both licensed resources and free resources (the latter selected by Library subject specialists and recommended for their academic quality). Each of these databases has been tested with a number of students, faculty, and staff, and shaped to reflect user opinion.
This year, more and more of the content of the Library Web site will be moved into database structures. At the same time, more Library services will be offered via the site, including real-time reference service. (For more on this, see E-Reference, below.) Automated systems will assess the use of these services, gathering data that enable us continuously to improve them.
Full-Text Electronic Information Resources
http://library.brooklyn.cuny.edu/electronic_resources/subjects.htm
Requiring a student who is learning via the Web to travel to a physical library would be the antithesis of online learning. Students engaged in Web-based education need corollary information resources. The Library supports a broad range of Web-delivered full-text journals and reference resources (accessible by title and subject) to support the research requirements that faculty who are teaching make of their students. There are more than 15,000 e-titles.
Reference Help via E-Mail
http://library.brooklyn.cuny.edu/electronic_resources/edesk.htm
To complement digital collections, from its Web site the Library offers reference service via e-mail. This spring we will begin moving from e-mail to real-time e-reference. For more on this, see E-Reference, below.
