My deinde Colleague pointed out some comments in moderation that I missed on my previous post called “My Beef With Researching”. There were a number of good comments there if anyone is interested in this matter.

One item that came up that I want to mention further is what we call OpenURL. Basically, it is quick way to send information to a “resolver” site from a library or other database. The resolver site will then resolve the information and point you to a relevant source is they have it on catalogue. To my knowledge the biggest and best OpenURL resolver is WorldCat Link Manager. My only beef with it is that for some reason it doesn’t link issn’s with WorldCat — that is the easiest way, in my opinion, to find out if a journal is in your library.
OpenURL is definitely a good thing and it is fantastic that school libraries are tapping in to it. I still find the DOI superior as it takes you directly to the digital object, but OpenURL is a close second. DOI’s are also a little more user friendly, as it is not too difficult to type in dx.doi.org/doi#, but trying to remember the syntax for OpenURL is not so easy.

In the comments of my previous post, Andy Keck mentioned that ATLA supports URL. Those of you who use ATLA know this, though you may not know it by that name. When you search in ATLA and get your results list, there should be a link saying “Find It” or something to that affect with a logo of your institution. This is an OpenURL link, allowing you to quickly see if your library has the item. I would love to see a few more OpenURL links added to ATLA, like WorldCat Link Manager for instance.

For those of you who don’t quite understand what I’m talking about let me just say this: many libraries and databases like ATLA are trying their best to connect you with the information as fast as they can with a protocol called OpenURL, and that is a great thing.

I want to now include one of the comments from my previous post that came directly from ATLA:

Dear Mr. Zacharias:

I am writing to officially respond on behalf of the American Theological Library Association (ATLA) regarding recent postings regarding the ATLA Religion Database and DOI issues on your blog:

http://www.deinde.org/blog/

To the best of our knowledge, we were not contacted by you before you posted these comments and then directly asked the readers to “nag and whine” to us.

In fact, if you would have contacted us in advance, we would have told you that we recently published some information in our Feb. 2008 newsletter that directly addresses your concerns:

Beginning in January 2008, ATLA’s Religion Database (RDB) will include any DOI (Digital Object Identifier) data that some journals are now using. The data will be coded in the MARC 21 024 tag, subfield a, with a subfield 2 code: doi as well. This may prove helpful to users who link to full text versions. This data is expected to appear in the summer 2008 data release. There are no plans at this time to add such data retrospectively. ATLA Newsletter, vol. 55 no. 2 (Feb. 2008), 14

In the future, I encourage you and your colleagues to contact us directly with any product questions in advance of any speculation.

We pride ourselves on both the quality of our products and our responsiveness.

I wasn’t aware I needed to ask permission to blog on a topic, and if you are a regular reader of deinde you know I try and throw some humor in once in awhile, which is what the “nag & whine” comment was about. And considering the fact that I use ATLA regularly and have not seen a DOI, I wasn’t just speculating. But even if people did bombard ATLA with email, that just means more people got informed of ATLA’s efforts, so you’re welcome!

More seriously though, I am very glad to hear that DOI’s will be included now in ATLA’s efforts as well as their OpenURL system which I was aware of— though I don’t like the limitation of it being connected only to my libraries OpenURL. I continue to use ATLA and encourage and teach my students to do so as well. So ATLA if I offended you, my apologies. Live long and prosper dudes!

Oh to be a student of the hard sciences and be able to use a database like Pubmed.
For those who don’t know what PubMed is, think of combining RAMBI, IXtheo, BIiBIL, BILDI, and ATLA all together into one delightful database complete with abstracts. But not only that — the actual PDF’s of the articles are there too. It is the one-stop shop for your research. But oh well, I’m a biblical studies student. Now I realize that this is a 21st century rant and I should be grateful that actual bibliography collection takes me a fraction of the time that it did for you old timer’s that studied before the 90’s, but I like to have my cake and eat it too. If the technology is there then that’s what I would like to use.
Now I could be wrong, but I think the vast majority of us use ATLA for our research. Let me outline some of the regular scenarios when finding articles on ATLA.

1. I find an article from CBQ or something else that is actually stored in ATLA(S). So I can download the PDF immediately. SWEEET!
2. I find an article that ATLA does not store. So I then go to my school’s library database, search the periodical list for the journal. A few things will happen:
   1. my library will have electronic access to the journal, like to JSTOR, and I go to that database, search for the article title, and download it.
   2. my library has electronic access to the journal. I go to the database, but they only started digitizing them 3 years ago so my article isn’t online.
   3. My library has access to an electronic database for the journal, but the older volumes of the journal require a further level of access that my university doesn’t have.
   4. My library only has the journal hard bound and I have to go down and photocopy it. How 1990’s is that!!

Now I realize that not every article will always be online now, I’ll have to wait another decade or so for that. But here is what I would like to have happen: I go to ATLA and search for stuff. I find an article and either:

1. ATLA has it stored as a PDF and is available for immediate download or,
2. ATLA provides the DOI to the article online

That’s it! How great would that be!

The DOI (Digital Object Identifier), it is the key that few in biblical studies have latched on to yet. It is a permanent and stable URL for an article — not a website but the actual article. Imagine how nice it would be to find the article you want in ATLA, open the DOI and BAM! you are taken directly to where the article is. The database would recognize your university proxy and the article is there for you to use. Most major article databases and publishers have begun or are already finished assigning DOI’s to their article databases, yet I do not know of any biblical studies bibliographic database (RAMBI, IXtheo, BIiBIL, BILDI, ATLA, etc) that have begun to make these a regular part of the citation information. It is such a great idea that I told Ebsco they need to start updating their records to add the DOI’s. Unfortunately, ATLA doesn’t work that way. They only add the content that the publishers give to them. dang it! So it is up to you publishers (and I know every self-respecting biblical studies publisher reads my o so important blog posts) to provide the DOI’s to ATLA, AND make sure that you tell them you want it as part of the citation. And you also have to provide the DOI’s for your archive - or ask ATLA to do it. That is not as hard as it sounds, because crossref.org has a DOI resolver that will do the work for you. Lastly, biblical studies publishers need to get on the DOI bandwagon if they haven’t already. Every article that is available online from a publisher should have a DOI — this includes those housed by ATLA or those hosted on a publisher site (like the new BBR archive online for instance). I thought of starting a petition to get ATLA to add DOI’s to their database, then realized how lame a petition like that would be. I’ll settle for whining and nagging, and hope that others will whine and nag too. Nagging and whining is what gets things done, trust me!

Cheers!

I’m a bit late to this party but anyone interested in bibliographic data, who controls it and the future of it as open/closed data should check out the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control at the Library of Congress and their recent draft report. This was responded to and concerns raised by the Open Knowledge Foundation. The OKF response to the working group has been signed and supported by just about every open access luminary out there.

Short excerpt from the intro:
The draft report of the Library of Congress’s Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control features many interesting suggestions. In particular we wholeheartedly endorse the vision of a bibliographic ecosystem which is “collaborative, decentralized, international in scope and web-based”. However, we are concerned that the report lacks any discussion of a key component for any future of bibliographic data: open licensing and access.

It is great to see that Google listens to the little people.

A while back I emailed Google and told them that they need to make an API system for Google Books, and that they should allow users to create their own little ‘bookshelf’ of Google books that they can then search. They emailed back and said it was a great idea that a few others have also suggested.

The API system isn’t here (yet), but you can now create your own library of google books as long as you have an account. This is very cool! Once you do a search, you will have an option to “add it to your library”. Once you do that, the list of books are available on a dedicated page accessible along the top of the page. From there, you can choose to search just those specific books. How unbelievably great is that!

This is going to be a very valuable resource. I’ll tell you how I am specifically going to use it right now. As many of you know I’ve started my PhD. So I’m going to populate this google books library with titles related to my dissertation topic. That way, I can do ‘in-text’ searches of the books. Now if all those nitpicky publishers would just get on the google books bandwagon, we would be talking real full text search. Unfortunately, the amount of material shown in the books is subject to the publisher.

Wait, it gets even better! If you are smart you use bibliographic management software or at least have a big excel or word file with all your books. Take all the ISBN’s of your books, and import the books straight into your google books library!

Happy researching!

books.google.com

During Deinde’s retooling one of my favorite pieces of software came out with a fantastic new version. Bookends released v.10 of its fabulous bibliographic software. Bookends already was the best of the bunch, and it now has left its competition in the dust. You can read my SBL Forum review here. There are too many new things to go into major detail, but we have a revamped window, a hugely updated list view which includes a PDF viewer and a number of different viewing configurations. Bookends also implemented a local URL system which assigns a URL to every citation and allows you to place the link anywhere you want. Customizing how you cite, link, and view citations have all been made more customizable as well.

For those who may use my Guide to SBL format with Bookends, I have updated it a little bit to conform to the latest version. You can download here.

The release of the latest Bookends has also brought to light a new free web resource that even those of you who don’t use Bookends may find useful. The site is called Refbase, and is basically a place to freely store your references - books, articles, book chapters, etc. The user can populate your database with records in bibliographic formats. The database can be searched, tagged, organized, and formatted for your bibliography or CV.

For fellow Bookends users, the sweet thing is being able to upload directly from your Bookends database. And from talking with the developers, this connection is only going to get better so that eventually I can have an online replica of my reference database. It is a very promising resource. If you are tight on cash and don’t need the full power of a bibliographic manager, refbase along with the free Firefox plugin Zotero may be just what the doctor order for you.

Happy citing!