CU Library's MyContents service could help ease info overload

By Lissa Harris

To stay informed on what is happening at the cutting edge of their fields, researchers must cope with the ever-increasing pace of new discoveries. Keeping up with the enormous volume of information is a constant challenge, and busy students and professors often struggle to find time to pore over stacks of new journals each month.

Now a new electronic service developed by Cornell librarians makes the task of sifting through the latest research easier. The service, called MyContents, allows subscribers to select the journals most important to them and receive tables of contents (TOCs) from newly published issues via e-mail.

"This service has been much requested for a long time, ever since we started providing digital resources," said Elizabeth Fontana, communications manager for Cornell University Library (CUL).

MyContents was tested by faculty, students and other users of the Veterinary, Mann, Geneva, Industrial and Labor Relations, and Engineering libraries for a year before its launch, universitywide, on Aug. 27 of this year. So far, users have been impressed.

"The table-of-contents alerting services available from Cornell and from publishers are one of the most significant aids to scholarship in recent years," said Nerissa Russell, assistant professor of anthropology. "I really appreciate this improvement."

MyContents is the newest addition to CUL's three-part suite of personalized library research tools called MyLibrary. The first, MyLinks, was launched in January 2000, allowing subscribers to customize a web page with links to their favorite online research tools. In January 2001, CUL launched MyUpdates, which sends out e-mail alerts when new books or other materials that match subscribers' interests arrive in the library. All three components of MyLibrary are available free of charge to the Cornell community.

In 1999 Cornell librarians formed a committee to develop the components of MyLibrary in response to widespread demand from faculty and students for more personalized library research tools.

An earlier electronic table-of-contents (TOC) service, available to patrons of Mann Library since 1997, was designed to handle just a few hundred journals and subscribers. MyContents was built for unlimited capacity -- and already has surpassed the capabilities of the older service. Currently, subscribers can receive TOCs from 956 journals, on topics ranging from Russian literature to volcanology, with no limit to the number of journals an individual can subscribe to.

One of the most useful features of MyContents, said Angela Horne, a member of the committee that developed MyLibrary, is its compatibility with the leading programs that researchers use to manage citations and bibliographies. Subscribers can choose to receive TOCs in EndNote, ProCite or ReferenceManager file formats.

"That's one of the unique parts of this particular service, and what I think will appeal the most to faculty and graduate students particularly," said Horne, who is coordinator of public services at the Johnson Graduate School of Management Library.

Improvements to MyContents already are in the works. Librarians hope to provide HTML versions of the e-mail alerts soon, possibly with clickable links to the full text of individual journal articles if they are available on line. Also, journals are constantly being added to the service.

Cornell librarians hope to see MyContents expand beyond the boundaries of the university. The software was designed, said Horne, with possible open-source distribution in mind -- meaning that the service could one day be used by many other libraries, which would have the ability to modify the basic architecture of the software to fit their needs.

"It would be a fabulous thing if we could share it, and that's definitely what we're hoping to do," she said.

Next month, Cornell librarians will give a presentation on the MyLibrary suite to their colleagues, statewide, at the New York Library Association's annual conference in Buffalo.

Members of the Cornell community can sign up for any part of the MyLibrary service by accessing the MyLibrary web site at http://mylibrary.cornell.edu.