We have updated our MARCXML and ONIX feeds, in order to better disseminate the books and chapters in our collections.
Almost everyone has at one time or another been asked to describe themselves. For the books and chapters in OAPEN and DOAB this happens all the time: many libraries, publishers and content aggregators want to know exactly what is in our collection. In order to answer these questions, we provide daily updated metadata exports – see here (OAPEN) and here (DOAB).
Two of those metadata exports have recently been updated: the MARCXML and the ONIX feed.
MARCXML – Now complying with the NAG guidelines
Figure 2 Metadata Profiles:MARC21 Records for Print & Electronic Books
The MARCXML feed – which is based on the MARC21 standard – is used primarily by libraries.
The MARC21 standard contains many options to describe publications, and thus it is quite helpful that the National Acquisitions Group (NAG) and the Southern Universities Purchasing Consortium (SUPC) have created guidelines for standardised MARC21 records for print books, eBooks and eTextbooks.
By following this standard, content providers can better support academic libraries. We have now made sure that our MARCXML metadata feed adheres to this standard.
Improved ONIX feed
Figure 3 ONIX for Books
Apart from the MARCXML feed we have also updated our ONIX feed. ONIX for Books is an XML format for sharing bibliographic data describing both traditional books and eBooks.
Just like MARC21, this standard is very comprehensive. It is also quite rigorous: there are many checks on the content. In order to make sure our metadata better fits with this standard, we have made several small adjustments to how related ISBNs or funding data are displayed.
We hope these changes to the metadata allow the books and chapters in our collection to describe themselves a little better. If you have further questions, please contact Ronald Snijder: r.snijder[@]oapen.org.
This month we have introduced a new metadata format: KBART. Adding the KBART export format to both DOAB and the OAPEN Library has been requested by the library community and offers another option for exporting our metadata and seamlessly connecting to the metadata and to open access books. The KBART export format is now available alongside the other metadata feeds on the OAPEN and DOAB websites.
Selective Export
In addition to the KBART format we have introduced a ‘selective export’ functionality for the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) & the OAPEN Library. This enables users of both platforms to export books and chapters in a flexible way: first by selecting the relevant titles and secondly by choosing the export format.
The selective export functionality makes it easier for specialist libraries, subject repositories and frequent users to only retrieve specified subsets of open access books according to their preferences.Please be aware that this export function is optimised for sets up to 500 titles.
How to use the Selective Export
Step 1: Search for books
Step 2: If needed, you can refine the export even further
Step 3: Select the export format
Step 4: The metadata becomes directly available
If you have questions about these new functionalities or wish to share feedback, please contact Ronald Snijder (r.snijder[@]oapen.org).
The OAPEN Library is a growing virtual library of open access books. Researchers and curious readers find their way to the OAPEN Library via a number of entrances. As they browse, land upon or virtually stroll through the OAPEN Library, what unique books may one discover on its bookshelves? Today we’ll take a tour through the high energy physics section, where we’ll find the latest collection added to the OAPEN Library: the SCOAP³ for Books collection.
Open access books in high energy physics
The SCOAP³ for Books collection currently includes over 20 open access books in high energy physics and will, as part of this pilot initiative, grow to include a set of over 100 important texts within the discipline.
This collection includes titles such as “The Standard Model and Beyond’’ written by Paul Langacker, part of the High Energy Physics, Cosmology, and Gravitation series published by Taylor and Francis (2017). This open access book provides an advanced introduction to the physics and formalism of the standard model and other non-abelian gauge theories. It provides a solid background for understanding supersymmetry, string theory, extra dimensions, dynamical symmetry breaking, and cosmology.
Next to this readers may encounter the open access book “Challenges And Goals For Accelerators In The XXI Century’’, edited by Stephen Myers & Oliver Brüning and published by World Scientific Publishing Company (2016). This book describes the past 100 years of accelerator development with a special focus on the technological advancements in the field, the connection of the various accelerator projects to key developments and discoveries in the Standard Model, how accelerator technologies open the door to other applications in medicine and industry, and finally presents an outlook of future accelerator projects for the coming decades.
The role of books for SCOAP³
These open access books are made available thanks to the work of SCOAP³ – the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics. SCOAP³ enables open dissemination of global research outputs in high energy physics and was first introduced in 2012, with the support of the European Organization of Nuclear Research (CERN).
So what is the role of the academic book for SCOAP³ and within high energy physics more generally?
The overall objective for SCOAP3 is to enable global, equitable open access for research in the discipline of high energy physics. Having successfully converted the majority of the journal literature in the discipline to open, the Consortium decided to expand the scope of the initiative to include academic books in high energy physics and related disciplines (such as accelerator physics and instrumentation).
“Through the support of members of the consortium and partnerships with key publishers, we are making important texts in our domain completely free for students, faculty and researchers around the world. The COVID19 pandemic demonstrated how important it is for content to be widely and seamlessly accessible, and we are committed to a future where research and academic texts are available openly to anyone who might need them.” – Dr. Kamran Naim, Head of Open Science, CERN
OAPEN Library collection services
Thanks to the partnership between SCOAP³ for Books and the OAPEN Library, the SCOAP³ for Books collection benefits from the various OAPEN Library collection services. These include hosting, digital preservation, dissemination and usage reporting.
The OAPEN Library includes these books as part of its metadata feeds, API schema and OAI-PMH harvesting protocol. This enables a wide range of organisations such as academic libraries, library intermediaries, research institutions, and discovery services (including Google Scholar) to provide visibility for these open access books around the world.
In the course of the next few months, more titles can be expected to be added to this unique collection of open access books.
On a regular basis, we look at the download data of the OAPEN Library and where it comes from. While examining the data from January to August 2021, we focused on the usage originating from libraries and academic institutions. Happily, we found that more than 1,100 academic institutions and libraries have used the OAPEN Library.
Of course, we do not actively track individual users. Instead we use a more general approach: we look at the website from which the download from the OAPEN Library originated. How does that work? For instance, when someone in the library of the University of Leipzig clicks on the download link of a book in the OAPEN library, two things happen: first, the book is directly available on the computer that person is working on, and second, the OAPEN server notes the ‘return address’: https://katalog.ub.uni-leipzig.de/. We have no way of knowing who the person is that started the download, we just know the request originated from the Leipzig University Library. Furthermore, some organisations choose to suppress sending their ‘return address’, making them anonymous.
What is helpful to us, is the fact that aggregators such as ExLibris, EBSCO or SerialSolutions use a specific return address. Examples are “west-sydney-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com” – pointing to the library of the Western Sydney University – or “sfx.unibo.it”– coming from the library of the Università di Bologna. And in this way, many academic libraries can also be identified from their web address. Some academic institutions only display their ‘general’ address.
Academic libraries and institutions
As mentioned before, our analysis delivered over 1,100 – 1,121 to be exact – different addresses. The chart displays those addresses divided by type, and we see that many academic libraries not just rely on aggregators such as ExLibris, but also directly give access to the OAPEN Library through their catalogs. The metadata of the OAPEN Library is freely available under a CC0 license, and can be downloaded as a MARCXML file to ensure easy library integration.
Which libraries and institutions are the biggest users of the OAPEN Library according to this data? The most downloads come from MediaLibraryOnLine, the first Italian network of public, academic and scholastic libraries for digital lending; the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford; and Universidad Peruana de Ciencas Aplicados.
We are happy to see that our collection is finding its way to libraries and academic institutions all over the world!
It all started with a preprint. Back in February 2020, I came across the article “Increasing Visibility of Open Access Materials in a Library Catalog: Case Study at a Large Academic Research Library”. Here, Jeff Edmunds and Ana Enriquez describe their work to highlight existing and add more open access titles to their library catalogue at Penn State University Libraries. Simply put, they investigated ways to make it easier for library patrons to discover open access books, by making them more visible in their library catalogue. Library catalogues ingest metadata based on the MARC standard, and the authors discussed recent developments regarding MARC and open access.
Their timing was perfect. The OAPEN Library was to be migrated to the DSpace 6 platform, and this was the right moment to revise our metadata offerings. Thus, I contacted Jeff Edmunds and asked how we could improve our MARC metadata feeds. This was the start of an involved conversation about the general quality of our metadata records and the presence of OA markers to make clear that the title described is open access.
Based on the recommendations, we updated our “MARC exports” in several ways. Firstly, each MARC record now contains both a link to directly download the book – or chapter – and a link to the landing page in the OAPEN Library. In this way, readers have the option to first assess the book in the OAPEN Library or they can directly get the title. Another improvement was to ‘move’ the license URL to MARC field 540, which helps libraries to automatically process in what way the books can be used. Furthermore, to make sure that the cataloguing software automatically flags the OAPEN Library content as open access, we added specific markup to the 506 and 856$7 fields.
The result
The result of all this? In August, Penn State University Libraries added close to 10,000 new open access records to their catalogue – based on the contents of the OAPEN Library. The import was based on this MARCXML feed, and converted to MARC21 using MarcEdit. To allow for the character limit of the identification field used by the cataloguing software, the HANDLE identifier used by OAPEN – for instance https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/25287 – was shortened to “oapen25287”.
At Penn State University Libraries, this is how it looks in “The CAT”, searching on “oapen library”:
Penn State University Libraries are transitioning from their old ‘classic’ catalogue to a new layer built using Blacklight. The plan is to add an Open Access facet or search limit in the new catalogue, which will allow users to find all OA content as a group. In the updated catalogue, the results look like this:
When we look at a single book record, the open license is clearly visible. Also, there are multiple links – in this case a link to the landing page in the OAPEN Library and a link to directly download the PDF version and a separate link that opens the EPUB version of this book:
The catalogue can be searched online, using this link.
Starting September, Penn State Libraries will update their “OAPEN collection” monthly.
Future wish list
While we are quite happy with the results, there are still some things that can be improved. To start with a technicality, the MARC Leader field is lacking a few characters at the end:
“=LDR 02817naaaa 00349uu” should be “=LDR 02817naaaa 00349uu 4500”. More important is the planned conversion of the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) to DSpace. The new DOAB platform will have the same export features as the OAPEN Library, including the MARC and MARC XML feeds.
Ideally, the descriptions in the OAPEN Library and DOAB would have name headings in an authorised form and WorldCat subject headings. These features will remain on our future wish list, at least for now.
Add the OAPEN Library collection to your catalogue?
Our cooperation with Penn State University Libraries was successful, especially because of the guidance we received regarding our MARC metadata output. We hope that other libraries will follow their example and add the OAPEN Library collection to their catalogue. If you have any questions, please contact me via r.snijder[@]oapen.org, or drop me a line on Twitter @ronaldsnijder.