IEEE Journal-level Links (Camille Wanat, UCB)

If you’ve searched for IEEE journals or magazines lately in either the CDL Directory or any of the CDL-hosted databases, you will have noticed a recent and positive change–direct journal-level links for these titles have been added.

In the CDL Directory, a search for any IEEE journal or magazine now leads to a direct link on the IEEE Xplore system from which the user can choose the appropriate year, volume, and issue of the journal.  This employs the persistent identifiers supplied by CDL’s Shared Cataloging Program.  [Previously, the user was instructed to follow a more convoluted route of searching INSPEC for the desired article or journal title in order to find article level links.  This was the best we could do at the time, but neither direct nor necessarily what the user wanted.]  Journal level links also provide access to recent issues of journal titles before article level links to that issue appear in INSPEC.

In a similar vein, these persistent identifiers have been used to create journal-level links in all of the CDL-hosted databases that include IEEE journals and magazines, such as INSPEC, Current Contents, MAGS, COMP, and ABI Inform.  Previously, the only links were the article-level links within INSPEC, since unfortunately, IEEE has not been able to provide us with the information to provide article-level links for their publications except via the INSPEC records.  Using the persistent identifiers to provide journal-level links has extended connections to full-text for these journals to all the other CDL-hosted databases in which they appear.