Maintenance of Open Resources at Galter Library

By Gretchen Neidhardt, MA, MLIS 
Metadata and Digital Projects Librarian 

From October 23-29, 2023, Galter Library joined researchers, publishers and authors in celebrating and promoting International Open Access Week. As a step toward our commitment to providing inclusive educational materials, the Collection Management and Metadata Services (CMMS) department just completed a comprehensive project aimed at enhancing the accessibility of open resources in our online catalog. This includes links to open access and public domain electronic journals and books. Providing access to these resources through GalterSearch requires strategic and consistent maintenance, and there are ways you can contribute to our process so that we can continue to provide reliable access to all library resources. 

What are open resources? 

The electronic open resources included in GalterSearch are published items that are freely available. There is a difference between open access and public domain items, but they are both considered open resources. Open access resources are research materials that have been made available by their creators, and can include data and datasets, books and articles. These items may still be subject to copyright restrictions but typically include a Creative Commons sharing license. Public domain resources are available by default, and can include items with expired copyrights, federal government publications and other items for which there is no copyright protection. 

None of these resources require a license agreement with a database, nor an account registration to access them. Our staff individually added approximately 2,900 open electronic books and journals to our collections, and those links are monitored by our CMMS department. Other freely available resources are sourced from various organizations like the Directory of Open Access Journals, and those links are maintained by the organizations themselves, so we do not need to monitor those as closely. 

Why do they need to be cleaned? 

These open resources are hosted by individual websites. Some sites have hundreds of resources in our collection (like HathiTrust or the Internet Archive), while some sites are only represented once. These sites have no obligation to us, nor us to them, which means we can freely use their information, but they are free to change or move that information without informing us. 

What does cleaning involve? 

Cleaning open resources involves a few simple steps: 

1. Isolate the manually cataloged open resources maintained by Galter staff within our campus-wide catalog of items. As of October 2023, this is around 2,900 out of 9,245,843 total titles. 
2. Export the URLs for these items. 
3. Write a script that will check these URLs and return an HTTP response status code. 
4. Manually check any resources that return an error status code. If a new URL can be found that is preferable. If not, but an archived version of the items exists, we'll enter that (most often found in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, but occasionally institutions will archive their own webpages). If the resource can no longer be found anywhere, we delete it from our collection. 

How can you help? 

If you notice any broken links as you search our catalog, please notify us and we will get them fixed. If you have the correct URL, please share that with us, but if not, we will find a current link or use an archived version of the resource so that the item remains available to researchers. To contribute to the maintenance of open resources at Galter Library contact us during our open hours or you can always email us at ghsl-ref@northwestern.edu.