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WEST Phase 4 AGUA Systems Development Updates

October 23, 2019 Author: Anna StrikerCategories:

This has been a very productive development cycle for the AGUA development team, with a mix of front-end updates to the user interface as well as back-end changes that will help facilitate journal family identification and collection analysis.

New interface for submitting unarchived holdings files in AGUA: Many of you have already used this for the unarchived ingest process for this cycle! This new user interface offers two options for submitting files directly in AGUA: the first option is a standard file upload tool, and the second option allows you to upload directly from a remote server.

New interface for location exclusions/storage flags in AGUA: In the past we’ve asked you to fill out a spreadsheet with all of your holdings/physical item locations and to indicate which are storage and which you want to exclude from analysis. This was an arduous and time consuming process, and asked you to review locations that aren’t used in the WEST project. With this new development, AGUA will automatically populate a table with the locations found in your unarchived holdings file(s), and you will make your location exclusions and flag storage locations directly in AGUA. You won’t need to create a spreadsheet of your locations, and you’ll only need to review the locations that are actually included in your unarchived holdings file.

You may have seen this new link listed in AGUA, but there won’t be any content populated until after the unarchived holdings files have been processed and loaded to the CDL Production server. Keep an eye out for emails with instructions on this in the near future!

Enhanced ability to identify journal families: The WEST project team tries as much as possible to identify titles that belong to the same journal family so that complete journal families can be archived together in a single institution rather than spreading archived holdings across several different institutions. To that end, we’ve enhanced our ability to match titles to existing journal families by running the records through several match routines, first using control numbers (subsequently attempting to match on OCLC number, ISSN, CODEN, and LCCN, in that order) and then using the combined and normalized author/title data from the input record. Records will be run through these routines until they produce a match.

eISSN as alternative matchpoint: When defining what Title Category journals are assigned to for collection analysis and archiving commitment proposals, we have traditionally used only the print ISSN to match with titles included in the select abstracting and indexing (A&I) databases that we load as our external sources for Title Categories 3 and 4. With this development, if a journal record doesn’t have a print ISSN but does have an eISSN present, AGUA will identify the eISSN in the input record and match on that, thus ensuring that these journal families are categorized accordingly.

Missing ISSNs derived for Archived Titles: WEST derives missing ISSNs when ingesting unarchived records data, but has previous not performed this same work for disclosure records that could include the same missing or incorrect identifiers. This may later affect how archived titles match to a journal family and serve as the basis of exclusion during collections analysis, leading to some titles that have already been archived being erroneously proposed again. This enhancement applies a similar workflow to remediate ISSNs as in the unarchived ingest by looking up the record’s OCLC number to find an ISSN. Additionally, the All Archived Titles report now includes the journal family ID.

Local holdings record call numbers now included in AGUA reports: Reports from AGUA have always included a call number, but until this dev cycle we have only been pulling out the call number as recorded in the journal’s bibliographic record which may not match the locally-assigned call number. With this enhancement we’re also able to include the call number from the local holdings record, increasing the usability of AGUA reports for locating materials on the shelf without having to perform additional analysis in your local system.

New institutional roster in AGUA: AGUA now includes a downloadable institutional roster! This table includes:

        • the institution name,
        • all OCLC symbols used by that institution for the WEST project,
        • contact information for the Primary Contact, an alternative contact, and the Technical Contact, and
        • what type of facility the institution is (Archive Builder, Archive Holder, or none)

Members can update their institution’s contact(s) displayed in this roster directly in AGUA, and the contact(s) that they list will populate into various reports (e.g., the on demand collection comparison reports). By making this information visible, Builders can reach out directly to institutions when they make calls for holdings or identify volumes needed for gap filling.

Automatic totals in Archiver journal commitment interface: This update provides a counter that automatically updates as Archivers make decisions about what proposed journals they will commit to archiving in a particular Cycle. This is particularly helpful for Builders who are making selections to stay within a budget for Silver and Gold titles.