More Digital Resources Now Accessible through the University Libraries’ Public Catalog

Three recent enhancements to the University Libraries’ public catalog, CardCat, dramatically enhance its power as a discovery tool for digital resources. Two of these involve links to two major, freely available repositories of digitized books. The third makes CardCat a comprehensive source for access to the University Libraries’ electronic journal collections.

Google Book Search Previews. Introduced in August 2009, CardCat now presents both a Google Preview search button and a preview pane on full-item views when an item is available in Google’s massive digital repository. CardCat users can browse the books directly in CardCat or follow the “More about this Book” link to use all the features of Google Book Search, including reviews, user tags, and links to related books. Limited previews are available for most Google Books, with many public domain books (items published prior to about 1924) available free in full text. In many cases, the Libraries’ local holdings of these titles are available in our Archives and Special Collections. The advantage of having digital access is that they are now freely available for access outside of the University Libraries.

Hathi Trust Digital Library. Added to CardCat in early October 2009, this new button leads to the growing Hathi Trust catalog of digitized books. According to its Web site, the Hathi Trust “was conceived as a collaboration of the thirteen universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) and the University of California system to establish a repository for these universities to archive and share their digitized collections.” The link button currently appears in over 15,000 CardCat records with matching titles in the Hathi Trust. All the titles we link to are in the public domain and can be freely accessed in full text. For more information about the Hathi Trust, see www.hathitrust.org.

Serials Solutions 360 MARC Updates Service. As a follow up to the suite of Serials Solutions products which the University Libraries rolled out during the spring and summer of 2009, including MultiSearch, MultiLink, and the re-launched Electronic Journals portal, the University Libraries have begun to catalog records for the electronic journals in MultiLink and the Electronic Journals portal. The new CardCat records link to the Electronic Journals portal will list one or more online sources for the journal title. With these 35,000-plus records, as well as monthly updates, CardCat now offers an additional, comprehensive access point for electronic journals.

Dr. Arthur W. Hafner, Dean of University Libraries, said that increasing access to informational resources at the desktop for students and faculty is one of the Libraries’ strategic initiatives. He said that these three enhancements to CardCat were achieved through the efforts of many personnel, particularly Kathryn M. Bohnert and James W. Hammons from Library Information Technology Services and Katharine D. James, Scott R. McFadden, and Kelley C. McGrath from Collection Resources Management.

For more information, contact James W. Hammons, Head of Library Technologies, JHammons@bsu.edu, 765-285-8032.