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Irina Sens
State and University Library of Lower Saxony, Platz der Göttinger
Sieben 1, D-37073 Göttingen, Germany
The project SSG-S aims at making these collected resources as comprehensively and easily as possible available to institutions of higher education, research and private enterprise alike. This does not only include a rapid document delivery service, but also aims at recording and making accessible all relevant material including electronic documents.
The major part of this investment in libraries works for the benefit of collection development in a distributed system. For individual libraries it is becoming more and more difficult to follow the development of scientific publications in all fields of science. Under the German distributed system of collection development a limited number of efficient research libraries receives financial support to build up their collections in specific areas of science as extensively as possible. This is done with the obligation to make their collections available in inter-library loan (ILL) and other document delivery services.
Twenty-three individual German research libraries thus receive special funds to develop their collections in the various distributed subjects. The distribution of subjects was organized according to existing special or traditional collections or the close connection to existing important research institutions. This system is rounded off by four central subject libraries (``Zentrale Fachbibliotheken'') for application-oriented subjects. The subjects are: Engineering Sciences, Natural Sciences, Medicine, Agricultural Science and Economics. Astronomy, Astrophysics and Space Research is one of the DFG special collections and is covered by the State and University Library in Göttingen. The areas of Physics and Space Travel are covered by the Technical Information Library (TIB) in Hannover.
Participating libraries are obliged to acquire specialized and highly specialized literature on a truly international level. They are particularly expected to buy as extensively as possible in the area of ``grey'' literature, that is reports, conference papers, preprints and government publications. Not only printed material, but also the whole range of digital publications has to be collected. Creating access independent of time and local factors is one of the more challenging recent obligations of the libraries involved.
The DFG predominantly covers the purchasing of special foreign literature. The procurement of standard literature from abroad and the acquisition of the research literature published in Germany in the specific collection's main fields are financed from the specific library's own resources. The DFG has developed and supported this system of distributed national collection development for nearly fifty years.
To give an idea of how funding is translated in concrete terms note a few statistics (Degkwitz 1994):
The effective use of all printed material, electronic documents, journal articles and preprints etc. is one of the essential components of this distributed (national) library. To realize this, ideally three conditions have to be fulfilled:
Today the library has 4 million volumes and 15,000 journal subscriptions. Thus, the library is one of the `Big Five' of German academic libraries. The library subscribes to 150 journals in the field of astronomy. The whole collection including the historical material consists of at least 100,000 volumes.
Overall the library plays an important role in the distributed national library scheme, collecting in 20 completely different fields like Natural Sciences, Pure Mathematics, Geophysics, Library Science, English and American studies, and, for example, in minor highly specialized fields like Korean Language and Literature. As a university library it is responsible for 27,000 students and 600 full professors, nine research institutions independent of the university (for example the Max-Planck-Institutes) and the Göttingen Academy of Science.
In addition to local services the library supplies others with about 150,000 inter-library loans per year including 17,000 through document delivery services; of these, an increasing number are from outside Germany.
The standard online contents services like Uncover or SwetsScan by Swets & Zeitlinger from the Netherlands cover approximately 50 journal titles in astronomy. Göttingen as a special collection library holds 150 titles. Under SSG-S services the library scans at present the tables of contents of 20 additional titles as they arrive and adds them to the Swets Scan database, named now Online Contents . The library will expand this to all astronomy journal titles it subscribes to and which are not currently contained in the Online Contents database. The service also includes the tables of contents of all electronic journals appearing in the field of Astronomy. The idea of a coordinated group of special collection libraries creating a joint periodical contents database from the tables of contents of the various journals acquired seems quite attractive. The potential of this idea could very well create databases that can easily compete with commercial databases. Once under the control of the special collection libraries these databases could be classified as much more professional than those available on the market. The professional organizations could invest their manpower in improved classification and indexing.
Searching in the database Online Contents is comparatively easy and offers all advantages of a WWW-interface (for example hypertext linking). There are various points of access: author, title, title of journal, Basic Code (something like LOC's Main Classes), International Standard Serial Number.
Selecting by Basic Code results in 75 titles of periodicals.
Clicking on the contents button one can view the tables of contents
(beginning with the most recent one).
Orders are filled within 72 hours, or by special request even within 24 hours. Standard delivery time is usually 48 hours. Delivery is by e-mail, fax or regular mail. Delivery prices depend on the means of delivery, type of service and user-group. Members of German universities or research institutions pay for example DM 5,- for electronic delivery, which is becoming the standard form of delivery. The service is not only offered to German users, but can be used worldwide.
The library of Göttingen prefers MP-TIFF format for electronic delivery. This format has the advantage that the whole document is zipped into one file. On scanners and mail-servers we use the software package ARIEL as developed by the Research Libraries Group (RLG), a service that is as close as possible to modern international standards of document delivery.
The end user is informed immediately about orders that cannot be filled. The ILL-Info button in the menu also permits the users to view his orders and check the state of processing.
Naturally this system also permits ordering of monographs and dissertations or other material that is not included in the database. The database still has to be changed. All databases have the same search functionalities as Online Contents. By the fall of 1998 we hope to present a full search across various databases, including catalogue data from the libraries involved and special databases like Inspec. Due to the international Z39.50 protocol this is no longer a dream but a fact and the ``one stop shopping'' for the user will become a fact, at least as far as printed material is concerned...
Licence agreements and the control of access and storage play a vital role in future acquisitions of electronic material by special collecting libraries, if the existing system of a distributed national library is to stay functional. The reader will expect to know where he can order anything relevant to his field of studies without having to search through whole series of servers, using a whole series of retrieval languages and interfaces.
Degkwitz, A., 1994, European Reserach Libraries
Cooperation: The Liber
Quarterly, 4, 275
Enderle, W., Schulenburg, F. & Weigang, G., 1996, Bibliotheksdienst, 30, 646
Next: Networking of Astronomy Libraries and Resource Sharing in
India
Up: What Have You Got That I Can Use?
Previous: CADIST Astronomie
Table of Contents -- Index -- PS reprint -- PDF reprint