New library Web site launches

by TALLEY HENNING BROWN

The university’s library has a rich history — it has been the campus repository for scientific journals and textbooks since it opened in 1906. But while once it was mostly accessed via a reading room on the first floor of Founder’s Hall, today the gateway to that repository is primarily an electronic one. As part of a refurbishment and modernization plan outlined in 2006, the Rita and Frits Markus Library and Scientific Information Commons last month launched its revamped Web site, complete with a more streamlined user interface and new, more comprehensive archival and research tools. Working with teams in Information Technology and the Office of General Counsel, the library staff is positioning the new site to address challenges that are particular to research communities in the age of new media.

The site’s new home page puts the most heavily used tools front and center, and divides all the library’s electronic resources into three categories: Resources, which includes the main search and archiving tools; Services, for the library’s acquisitions and other material-related requests; and Communications, where users can find information about library events and news.

The library has also launched four new online services, accessible via the Web site. DSpace, an open-source software that facilitates sharing of digital files, will allow users to archive and organize text files, images, moving images, audio files and data sets in one central, Rockefeller-owned repository. Research Portals, an offering still in development, gathers subscription and Web-based resources according to research area. The Immunology, Virology and Microbiology Research Portal, for example, offers antibody databases, profiles of microorganisms and links to associations that track the latest HIV research or emerging infectious diseases. Pubget, a biomedicine-specific search engine with a growing collection of nearly 20 million research articles, provides journal subscribers immediate access to entire articles at the click of a button, one step faster than PubMed, which serves mainly as an abstract database.

PubSubmit, on the other hand, helps researchers with their own articles. In the spring of 2008, the National Institutes of Health instituted the Public Access Policy, requiring that all papers resulting from NIH-supported research be made publicly accessible by submission to PubMed Central, the National Library of Medicine’s digital archive of research literature. PubSubmit allows Rockefeller investigators to hand off their journal articles, at which point the library and legal office together review each paper for compliance to NIH guidelines, submit it to PubMed Central and obtain its resulting PMC identification number.

“We purposely placed PubSubmit at the top of the library home page, using big blue buttons that can’t be missed,” says Layne Johnson, former scientific informationist at the library. “We’ve programmed that spot on the home page with a great deal of flexibility so that in future, as new regulations and new needs arise, we can develop new tools like PubSubmit that are specifically geared to the needs of the Rockefeller research community, and they’ll be just one click away.”