Information Express News

New Tipsheet: IEOnline Administrative Functions

IEOnline administrators may find our new tipsheet useful: it contains information on how to use the IEO admin area as well as how to get more information and perform regular tasks related to your account.

Download it from the right-hand menu under Documents and Materials, or click here.

Go Go Service Quality!

As I get ready to go out of the office for a couple of weeks I've been reminding people that I won't be here to and providing them with alternate contacts. I've also been learning some of the people who I work with regularly aren't really aware of the abilities of our Service Quality department, so I'd like to take some time here to talk about it.

Service Quality (SQ) is the hub of document delivery. The folks there (right now Neema is working on his own but will be joined by a new person next week) run reports, answer questions, check status and do all sorts of tasks to ensure that the orders you place are well taken care of while they're here. They are also the advocates of our clients within IE - they respond to your inquiries, deal with any problems related to orders and work with other departments to enhance or clarify our services and to add new services as requested by our customers.

What many people don't know is that SQ is also well capable of dealing with many requests related to IEOnline. They already handle some back-end administrative tasks for IEO and are able to answer most questions you may have about the system, especially those related to placing orders.

Certainly there are also departments you may contact for special needs: myself for more advanced IEOnline questions or Rush for anything related to rush orders or clean copies - but Service Quality is always a great place to start if you're not sure who to call or can't reach the other people who you think could help. If they don't know the answer they're a very short step away from finding someone who does and can escalate any problem out to another group and make sure you get a response.

The Service Quality department is open from 8am - 5pm PST and can be reached by phone at +1 (650) 812-3588 or email at service@ieonline.com. Those points of contact are always checked and staffed no matter who may be in the office at any given time and so please make use of them if you have any needs whatsoever.

(In case you missed it, I'll be out of the office from Sept 26th-Oct 6th)

We've got RSS, how 'bout you?

In talking to people about this blog, I've learned that there are still people who don't "get" RSS. They maybe understand it or recognize it, but don't use it or think that it would be applicable to them. And I understand this myself - while I "understood" RSS, I didn't really "get" it until about ten months ago. Now, via the magic of RSS and a good feedreader (and I've tried them all - I'm always in the market for a better feedreader) I can keep up with a staggering number of feeds. All of them, of course, highly professional and none related at all to celebrity gossip. Some days it seems like madness but I've been able to keep up with websites and read content I otherwise wouldn't have accessed or had the time to check out because it's all right there in one stream every day.

The BBC offers a pretty good explanation of what RSS is and also mentions why it is. And more recently I came across another one from Of Zen and Computing (via Lifehacker). I offer them up if you're looking for some more understanding or "getting it".

Gateways to IE Online for document ordering

If you and your users have access to other databases for searching and then want to order documents from the results (those that aren't available via immediate fulltext download, of course), sometimes you hit a dead end and have to resort to cut-and-paste. But increasingly these databases provide document ordering options and Information Express can be one of them. We can create what we call a "gateway" link from that database directly into IEOnline and transmit the citation automatically into our order form using OpenURL.

Since these links are so easy to create we hadn't done a great job of tracking them, but recently pulled together a comprehensive list of outside services that can be configured to act as gateways to IEO for document delivery. They are:

Elsevier -

     ScienceDirect (email only)
     SCOPUS (testing)
     EiVillage
     EiVillage
     Crossfire (testing)

PubMed

Ovid

CAS -
     SciFinder

Ebsco

Thomson -
    Scientific/ISI-
        Inspec
        Web of Science
        Current Contents
Thomson -
    Dialog -
       Datastar Web

Link Resolvers from:
SFX
SerialsSolutions Article Linker
Ebsco LinkSource
1Cate

Other:
Endnote

If you're an IEOnline admin and want to know more about how to get these set-up please give me a call.

     ScienceDirect (email only)
     SCOPUS (testing)
     EiVillage
     EiVillage
     Crossfire (testing)

PubMed

Ovid

CAS -
     SciFinder

Ebsco

Thomson -
    Scientific/ISI-
        Inspec
        Web of Science
        Current Contents
Thomson -
    Dialog -
       Datastar Web

Link Resolvers from:
SFX
SerialsSolutions Article Linker
Ebsco LinkSource
1Cate

Other:
Endnote

Status E-mails To End Users for Outstanding Orders

In addition to the status alerts that account administrators can set up through their IEOnline accounts, we can now send e-mails about individual outstanding orders to end users to let them know that their orders are still in process. Your account can be set up so that if an order remains unfilled after a certain number of days, an e-mail will be sent to indicate that it is still in process.  An example of the e-mail is shown below.

Recipients of status e-mails
Your account can be set up so that status e-mails will be sent to one or more of the following e-mail addresses:
•    the requester’s e-mail address
•    the account administrator’s e-mail address
•    one other e-mail address (eg a central or library e-mail address)
The combination of recipients can be different for regular and rush orders. However, e-mails can only go to individual requesters for orders that are placed through IEOnline, because this is the only way that the requester’s e-mail address will be included our processing system with their orders.

Timing of status e-mails
You can choose the number of business days after which a status e-mail will be sent for outstanding orders and also the interval after which the mail will be sent again, if an order remains unfilled. These time intervals can be set differently for regular and rush orders.

Report feature - gateway statistics

The administrative area of IEOnline has a reports section with a number of different reports available via download, display or that can be emailed to you. Included in these are reports on your company's orders placed through the IEO system - via document delivery, redirected to you and/or retrieved from a redirect to document delivery.

The order, redirect and retrieve reports all contain a column for Gateway info. The information there gives some indication of how the order was placed – via which system. That could mean via IEO tables of contents or the blank order form, or coming into IEO from a third-party database.

The information is not perfect – not all gateways coming into us provide details that we can capture. In cases where the gateway does not provide that info but the order was still placed via a gateway, we are using "OpenURL” to indicate. Over time we hope to work with these providers to give us the “sid” field we need to properly identify them.

Additionally, we are working on better identifying order methodologies within IEO - blank order form vs. web tocs vs. search vs. email tocs.

Ordering via EndNote

If you use EndNote to organize your citations, you can also use it to place orders with IEOnline.

To do so, you must first customize the OpenURL settings.

Go to:

File > Preferences
Select "OpenURL"
Check "Enable OpenURL"
Change the "OpenURL Path" to: http://www.ieonline.com/cgi-bin/open
The "Arguments" stay the same as they are in the default setting.
Click the "SAVE" button. Close the window.

Once configured, here's how to use the ordering option:

Select the citation and open it.
From the top menu select: Reference > OpenURL Link

A window in your browser should open to IEOnline (with your company's logo on the top left if your IP is validating correctly - i.e.  You are on campus at a company that subscribes to IEOnline). Make any selection like "Normal/Urgent", enter your ID & Password (or sign-up for a new account), click Order Now.

The ordering function uses the guest account login.

How It Works: Guest Login

When someone comes into IEO as a guest (either directly by clicking on a guest login button or link, or from a gateway), our system uses their IP address to recognize them. If their IP address matches one that our system knows belongs to a particular company or institution then that’s the template (company) we assign them to. If their IP address is not in one of our templates, then we direct them to a generic guest system where they can order by credit card.

On the page they get to, which we call either the Order List page or the guest account page, they will have a number of options, depending on the customizations of that company’s template. A user from a subscribing company can tell if they are on the correct system for their company because the company or library logo would appear on the top left.

If their IP address has not been recognized and they have an existing account with IEOnline, the user can login from the Order List page and they will be redirected to the custom site for their company.

An example of when a user might not be assigned directly their company's custom website is when they are at home using the system.