Thursday 6 September 2007

JSTOR

JSTOR is a major user of SICIs, hence I've been exploring it to see how hard it would be to add support for JSTOR (and SICIs) to my OpenURL resolver. Helpfully JSTOR provides a list of journals they archive, which is also available as a comma delimited file. I grabbed the biological serials collection list and extracted information on the journals JSTOR carries.

Another incidental by product was a further 87 new journals to my database of journal names and ISSNs. Just to remind myself how to do this, this is the SQL to insert the new journal names and ISSNs.

INSERT INTO issn(title, issn)
SELECT jstor.journal, jstor.issn FROM jstor
LEFT JOIN issn ON jstor.journal = issn.title
WHERE issn.title IS NULL;


The next step would be to add code to the OpenURL resolver so it could figure out whether a reference was in JSTOR and provide a link to that resource (as well as any other links I have). For example, Walker et al. "The Effect of Feeding History on Retreat Construction in the Wolf Spider Hogna helluo (Araneae, Lycosidae)" is in JSTOR (sici:0161-8202(1999)27<689>2.0.CO;2-7), and is also in my database as the PDF is freely available online.

It would be nice if my OpenURL resolver could take a SICI and return metadata that included both the availability in JSTOR and on the American Arachnological Society web site.

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