IEEE Conferences in UC-eLinks (Brian Quigley, UCB Resource Liaison)

Thanks to the diligence of Margery Tibbetts (CDL), users can now link to most IEEE conference papers online through UC-eLinks from INSPEC.  Over the past year, IEEE has been depositing its conference data into the CrossRef database.  Upon completion, ExLibris created over 4000 title level records in their SFX target to facilitate linking.  Margery then wrote “a target parser that uses the DOI (Digital Object Identifier), when available, to link to the actual paper.”  When there is no DOI found, the link goes to the conference proceedings on IEEE Xplore instead. In quickly testing a sample of IEEE papers in INSPEC, I found that the vast majority did indeed link directly to the paper.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for linking from Compendex.  It seems Compendex uses the ISSN for many IEEE conferences, if it includes a standard number at all.  Since the title level records in the SFX target are based on ISBN, the links still do not work well in Compendex.  Luckily, most IEEE users should be directed to INSPEC anyway.