OLinks Tables, Creating and Submitting. [edit] Introduction and Important Notes

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1 OLinks Tables, Creating and Submitting From AldenStaff Jump to: navigation, search Contents [hide] 1 Introduction and Important Notes 2 Creating OLinks Tables, Method One (Preferred): Use Excel VBA Macro 3 Creating OLinks Tables, Method Two: Manually Manipulate the Data o 3.1 Creating the Monthly Master Table o 3.2 Deleting Unnecessary Data o 3.3 Creating the FIRST YR and LAST YR Columns o 3.4 Reordering the Columns o 3.5 Filling In the Link Level and Priority Columns o 3.6 Creating the Athens and Regional Campus Tables 4 Submitting and Backing Up the Data [edit] Introduction and Important Notes The OLinks tables are specially formatted Microsoft Excel spreadsheets that list the electronic journals Ohio University users have access to, along with their ISSNs, URLs, and other specific information. OhioLINK s OLinks system uses this data to generate links to e-journals when patrons click the OLinks, Find It!, or Find a Copy button in OhioLINK databases. For a description of the OLinks data format, see As of this writing, the person in charge of managing e-journal cataloging is responsible for creating and maintaining the OLinks tables. OLinks tables are created and submitted once a month, at the same time as Marc records are delivered and loaded from Serials Solutions, usually on or shortly after the 15th day of the month. (OhioLINK staff have requested that tables be submitted no more often than once a month.) The "SSJ report" delivered with Serials Solutions Marc records is used as the starting point for creating OLinks tables. The most recent SSJ report can always be obtained from ftp://ohiouniv:ou-4ou@ftp.serialssolutions.com/.

2 [edit] Creating OLinks Tables, Method One (Preferred): Use Excel VBA Macro Carrie has created a Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications macro for Excel, which takes an SSJ report and automatically turns it into completed OLinks tables. Create a macro using Image:VBA macro for OLinks tables.rtf as the code, open the SSJ report, run the macro (it takes a few hours to complete), then submit the resulting tables. Since this method requires relatively little human intervention, it is recommended (ask someone in Systems for help with setting up and running the macro if necessary). [edit] Creating OLinks Tables, Method Two: Manually Manipulate the Data [edit] Creating the Monthly Master Table Open the SSJ report in Excel, then re-save under the name ohiou_olinks_master_mm_dd_yy (or some other logical name including the word "master"). [edit] Deleting Unnecessary Data First, delete from the spreadsheet all rows that either cannot be, or do not need to be, included in the OLinks table: 1. Delete all rows that have no data in either the ISSN or eissn column. (Do a two-level sort by ISSN and eissn to bring together all the rows that lack both, then delete them as a block.) 2. Delete all rows that have nothing in the Start Date column (sort by Start Date, then delete rows as a block). 3. Many collections of journals are automatically included in OLinks and so do not need to be included in our table; these include the OhioLINK Electronic Journal Center, the OhioLINK-provided Ebsco databases, the Directory of Open Access Journals, LexisNexis Academic, and ProQuest Nursing. Others, such as Factiva and TableBase, are deliberately excluded from OLinks due to too-many-simultaneous-user problems, unreliability of full text provision, or other issues. Journals in all of these collections need to be removed from the spreadsheet. See the section of Image:VBA macro for OLinks tables.rtf headed "get rid of rows that represent journals..." for a complete list of collections to be removed. To remove these titles from the spreadsheet, sort by Resource, then delete blocks of rows. [edit] Creating the FIRST YR and LAST YR Columns

3 The object here is to take the Start Date and End Date columns in the SSJ report, which provide dates in a variety of formats, and copy them into new columns (headed First Year and Last Year) containing only dates in YYYY format. For example, if a cell in the Start Date column has the value 03/01/2001, the corresponding cell in the First Year column should have just plain First, sort the spreadsheet by Start Date. Create new Column, First Year, just to the right of Start Date. Then, copy and paste or otherwise manipulate blocks of cells in Start Date so that you end up with corresponding year-only dates in First Year. Methods of doing this depend on the format of the individual cells and the vagaries of various versions of Excel. In cases where cells in Start Date are already in YYYY format, they can simply be copied and pasted. The formula =TEXT(XX,"yyyy"), where XX is the cell in Start Date, sometimes (not always) works on dates in M/D/YYYY format. If the above formula doesn't work on some blocks of MM/DD/YYYY-format dates, a find-and-replace-all command using??/ in the Find box, and nothing in the Replace box, sometimes does the trick. After completing the First Year column, repeat the above procedure using the End Date column to create a new column called Last Year. [edit] Reordering the Columns Rearrange, rename, insert and/or delete columns where needed, until you have the following sequence: Column A: Title Column B: ISSN Column C: E-ISSN Column D: First Volume Column E: First Year Column F: Last Volume Column G: Last Year Column H: Source (corresponds to Resource in the SSJ report) Column I: Rule (corresponds to URL in the SSJ report) Column J: Link Level Column K: Priority [edit] Filling In the Link Level and Priority Columns First, fill in the entire Link Level column with the word JOURNAL in each cell. This indicates that the links are at the "journal" level (linking to the journal home page, not the individual issue or article). Links in the format provided by Serials Solutions are generally at the journal level. Changing most of these journal-level links to article-level links would require an inordinate amount of time and effort spent typing in linking rules which vary for each journal. (Another

4 advantage of the VBA macro is that it does a changes a lot of journal-level links to article-level links for you, efficiently.) However, article-level links can be created very easily for JSTOR, and the amount and quality of content from JSTOR is good enough that it s worth the time and effort. For rows of the table that have something beginning with JSTOR in the Source column, delete the existing text in the Rule column and replace it with the following: Then, change Link Level for these rows to ARTICLE. The Priority column is filled with numbers on a scale from 1 to 10, representing order of preference for using the link; for example, if the same journal appears to be available from two different sources, we would rather send the user to a relatively reliable source, like JSTOR, than to a relatively unreliable one like HighWire Press's freely accessible collection. Therefore, journals in JSTOR would be assigned a high priority (like 1) while journals in HighWire Freely Accessible would be assigned a low priority (like 9). (OhioLINK EJC content and is automatically assigned a "0" and given priority over any lines in our data table; Ebsco and LexisNexis content is automatically assigned a low priority.) To populate the Priority column, sort the spreadsheet by Source, then copy and paste values into blocks of Priority cells. For details on Priority assignments currently used, see the VBA script. In general, JSTOR is assigned a 1, most freely accessible sources are assigned a 10, and most other databases are assigned a 5. The impact on the user experience does not seem sufficient to justify making finer distinctions. [edit] Creating the Athens and Regional Campus Tables Starting from the master spreadsheet, you will create six separate spreadsheets, one for the Athens campus and one for each of the five regional campuses. Each spreadsheet will include only materials that can be accessed by persons from that campus. First save, the master spreadsheet under a new name: ohiou_olinks_athens_mm_dd_yy (or something else logical involving the word "Athens"). Next, create five new blank spreadsheets, one for each regional campus, with the names ohiou_olinks_chillicothe_mm_dd_yy, ohiou_olinks_eastern_mm_dd_yy, etc. Copy and paste the column header row from the Athens spreadsheet into each regional spreadsheet. Now, sort the Athens spreadsheet by Rule, and start copying and pasting blocks of data from the Athens spreadsheet to the regional spreadsheets. In general, you can tell which data to paste into each regional sheet by looking at the proxy server redirects found at the beginning of the URL in the Rule column. (See Access Control and Location Codes under Electronic Resources Cataloging General Principles, as well as Proxy Server Redirects with Associated 049 Symbols and Bib- Level Location Codes.)

5 JSTOR titles all share the proxy server redirect jstor.pl, but are accessible to different combinations of campuses depending on which JSTOR collection they belong to. To deal with JSTOR titles, sort by Source (collection) and assign blocks of rows to different spreadsheets following the guidelines under JSTOR Collections Access Restrictions. Health and Wellness Resource Center titles should be included in the Chillicothe, Eastern, Southern, and Zanesville tables only (and should be deleted from the Athens table). Rows that have no proxy redirect in their URLs are generally freely accessible and should be included in all six campus tables. Once you have copied and pasted all appropriate rows into the regional campus tables, you OLinks tables are ready to submit to OhioLINK. [edit] Submitting and Backing Up the Data To submit the data to OhioLINK, the tables (as attachments) to Also save all the six campus spreadsheets and the master spreadsheet to a safe location (as of this writing, copies are saved under P:\Carrie Preston\OLinks Tables backup (3 months)). Retrieved from "