United Nations Public Service Awards Case Studies

• Problem 1 : Time consuming in journal searching
Currently, there are more than 300,000 periodical titles published around the world as indexed in ULRICHS Periodical Directory http://ulrichsweb.serialssolutions.com . 12,000 journals are indexed in ISI Web of Science, 10,000 are Impact Factor Journals indexed in ISI Journal Citation Reports and 18,000 are indexed in Scopus. They may be accessible in a publisher or vendor platform such as ScienceDirect, ProQuest, EBSCOHost, Taylor & Francis Online, JSTOR, Ovid, Sage and a lot of journals also free available in the Internet. The existence of too many sources in too many platforms will make our researchers confuse on what journal they need to read and to publish. This may cause time consuming in literature search because users need to use and familiarized different platform to find different journals. Our experience in UKM Library discovered that users spent about 25 minutes to find full text paper in a high impact journal.
• Problem 2 : High cost of journal subscription
Today, Malaysian academic libraries in public higher learning institutions are spending millions ringgit a year for subscribing full text electronic journals or online databases from various platform (website). This is because journals are one of the valuable sources for teaching, learning and research activities in a university. For example, in year 2010, about RM70 million has been spent in this business. However, there is an argument on the percentage of unique and duplicate journal titles subscribed by Malaysian Libraries. The fact is library cannot afford the increase of subscription cost from year to year. Cooperation between libraries in knowledge through service known as interlibrary loan may help university libraries in cost saving. Despite, it can be detrimental because of the sharing of information through interlibrary loan cannot be implemented efficiently if academic libraries keep high percentage of duplicate title compared to unique titles.
• Target Group Affected: More than 2,000 libraries are now established in Malaysia ranging from public libraries, academic libraries, state libraries, special libraries, school libraries, rural libraries and else. Malaysian population reaches 28 million and many of them are library users. Our project aim to enhance journal visibility, accessibility and usage not only for the higher learning communities but hope to bring a knowledge and social impact at national level.
• Key ideas:
The existence of too many resources (subscribed or free basis) need to be organized and put in single platform for researchers to do a quick one stop search and get the most relevant full text journal. The system need to allow users to identify those journals at each institution where full-text access available (combined with open-access journals) and journal impact factors would be useful for academicians choosing journals to submit papers. A simple system that identified these duplications would provide very useful information for libraries as journal subscriber when negotiating the price for these services, and allow alternative journals to be substituted.

What is the initiative about? (the solution)
The Solution: Our solution is known as JETP: Your full text e-journals one stop center http://www.eklik.ukm.my/jetp is an ICT based product contains and manages more than 22,000 full text e-journals subscribed by the Library and 5000 open access journals from various publishers all around the worlds. The achievement: This online database is accessible anytime and anywhere. It is a one stop search platform that eases researchers, scientist, academicians, librarians and students to search and locate full text high impact journals. The search can be done by journal title, subject categories, ISSN, and source title. In simple words, JETP has combine different publisher platforms to be one single platform. Currently a total of 27,000 full text e-journals are easily accessible by UKM’s users through JETP and 5,000 open access journals are also made available to the public around the world. The project objectives are; 1. To be one stop center collections of all types of journals. 2. Easiest search and services to professionals, researchers, academicians, students and member of public. 3. Avoid libraries at universities and government agencies waste money by duplicating journal access when subscribing for access to multiple online portals.

Who proposed the solution, who implemented it and who were the stakeholders?
15 Library professionals at UKM have proposed this solution to the Library management in June 2009. Since then we developed and implemented a fully working system that brings together information about more than 22,000 journals (from 23 databases and 5,000 open-access journals), and customized to current subscriptions at UKM. This tool is designed to help libraries manage their access to online reference collections and provide other useful information to library users. The Library team is one of the Library Innovation and Creative Team known as KIK KLIK. This system is fully established in May 2010 without a cost and copyrighted in May 2011 for early version.

Describe how and when the initiative was implemented by answering these questions
a. What were the strategies used to implement the initiative? In no more than 500 words, provide a summary of the main objectives and strategies of the initiative, how they were established and by whom.
The project started in June 2009 by the Library Innovation and Creative Team with the objective to develop a master list of e-journals subscribed by UKM Library with hyperlinks to full text journals and publishers including information such as Journal Impact Factor, subject categories, ISSN, and source of online databases. As a team, we have set up Gantt Ghart, conducted more than 20 meetings, divided task among team members and finally managed to complete the project in May 2010. We then deploy our homepage in July 2010 inclusive a web analytical tool (motigo web) as to monitor the usage of JETP from Malaysia and other countries.

b. What were the key development and implementation steps and the chronology? No more than 500 words
The methods used include: (1) UKM Library subscribed e-journals list in Microsoft Excel were collected from each publisher and vendors: information includes journal titles, database titles, ISSN, subjects and hyperlinks. (2) Each journal was searched at article level to verify full text accessibility as our aim to completely cover only full text journals in this product. (3) Data mapping in Microsoft Excel used to obtain Impact Factor in Journal Citation Reports latest edition. (4) Proxy server hyperlinks were added to each journal to allow access of the subscribed journals in and off campus by UKM Library users. (5) Dynamic web database was developed using MS FrontPage and MySQL. Since July 2010, the e-journal master list known as JETP (Fulltext Electronic Journals with Impact Factor) http://www.eklik.ukm.my/jetp is accessible using journal title, ISSN, subject or database title.

c. What were the main obstacles encountered? How were they overcome? No more than 500 words
The main obstacles encountered to develop this system are to collect the e-journals subscribed by the Library from various sources. In 2010, UKM subscribed for more than 50 online databases all around the world. This requires us to contact different vendors for different e-journals. After received the list from those publishers and vendors, we need to verify the full text accessibility by searching some articles and try to download the full paper within the subscription period. At this stage, internet connectivity is a must and network stability is unpredicted. We discovered some journals given by publishers and vendors were not accessible at full text level. For this case, conversation to the publishers and vendors has been made to ensure all journals that we subscribed need to be accessible correctly at full text level. At the same time, we also collect more than 5000 open access journals as to enrich our collection. To maintain the accessibility of open access journals and ensure accurate linkage is a challenge because most of them are originally located in nonprofit organization homepage that can cause low technical support if we face technical disabilities. The important thing is we manage to help people easily access to free journals (open access journals) and make use our subscribed journals via interlibrary loan services. Despite being accessed every day, JETP version 1 needs much more enhancement to be done by technical experts both in design and computer programming activities. Our team lack this capabilities since our background are librarians and some of them are library assistants. To overcome these obstacles, we have applied to the University and Innovation Grant facing lot of presentations and pitching sessions from the committee.

d. What resources were used for the initiative and what were its key benefits? In no more than 500 words, specify what were the financial, technical and human resources’ costs associated with this initiative. Describe how resources were mobilized
JETP version 1 has been developed by our team without a financial cost. As the prototype ready in May 2010, we received a desktop PC (2007 version) from Library IT department. The IT Department helps us to upgrade the desktop to be a client server, install open source web application (which is XAMPP Apache, PHP). Since then, the IT Department plays a vital role in supporting networking capabilities. We also received a very good technical support from the University Computer Center.

Is the initiative sustainable and transferable?
Since the introduction of JETP, it has increased productivity among researchers and scientist since vital sources of information are now more accessible. In average JETP helps researchers to find their full text article within 2 minutes as opposed to 25 minutes before JETP was introduced. As of 20th December 2011, JETP portal has accumulates a total of 175,606 hits from 25 countries source: http://webstats.motigo.com/s?id=4772761 Significance and Innovation/ Benefit of the Research • Software can be modified to the needs of each institution (not possible with standard competing solutions). This software will allow subscribed journals accessible at anytime, anywhere via the ezproxy system. • The institution maintains ownership of the data it enters into the system. • Impact factors are provided to guide academics in journal selection. If an institution did need has subscribed impact factor data via Journal Citation Reports, another solution can be proposed, such as the coverage of ISI Web of Science or Scopus indexed journals. This information is valuable for University assessment academic publication. This system high replicable capability. This is because, libraries in Malaysia and other country have their digital collection that need to be access both within the library and other places. In the Internet era, visibility and accessibility of a journal can be done through an application known as ezproxy. Our system also used ezproxy as one of the system component. We are among 2500 institutions all around the world that use ezproxy. Most of the academic libraries in Malaysia also have ezproxy. This will make the replication easier because they have the basic technology and need some more application to run our system. In June 2011 JETP was awarded the innovation fund from UKM amounted to RM100, 000 to enhance the existing system. The goal of the grant is to commercialize JETP. The project is spearheaded by the team from UKM Library and a UKM startup company, Refrex Sdn Bhd. (a private entity owned by the university). The enhanced product, JETP 2.0 is available in the market since December 2011. JETP 2.0 is now entering its marketing phase. The commercial stage will help the product to sustain itself and grow to benefit the society and cultivate knowledge sharing among Malaysians.

What are the impact of your initiative and the lessons learned?
The ease of access to that information also translated into the increase of full text journal usage, thus maximizing an organization investment in journal subscriptions. In UKM, more than 2.1 millions articles had been downloaded with the cost of MYR2.30 or USD0.72 per article. Without the subscription from UKM the articles would normally range from USD20 – USD50 per article. JETP has the potential of gathering such information. This gives the various institutions the information needed to have a national level interlibrary loan service. The knowledge and intelligence sharing in the national level will inevitably helps to reduce cost and redundancy in online journal subscriptions. Since its introduction, JETP has been acknowledged to be very viable and has a very huge potential. This is proved by the various success stories and recognitions received by JETP. JETP is the finalist for National Innovation Award 2011, a runner up for the Ministry of Higher Education Innovation Award 2011, a runner up for Malaysian Libraries Innovative Creative Circle Convention and the winner of UKM Innovation Award. We received a lot of lesson learned toward this project. As a team we are now strengthening our relationships and cooperation. We have built our capabilities to overcome any obstacles to bring this project as success. We do believe, as civil servant, not only a pure researcher and academicians can success in an innovation project, but all people have their chance and capacity to do it. The most important task for us for next is to commercialize this product, sustain and looking forward for further research and development. At the end, we hope that our product will be recognized and used as the national hub for journal collections. This can be done through national subscription project by Ministry of Higher Education or known as consortium subscription project. This initiative is now working properly at national level for 5 online databases (in 2010-2012 - Scopus, ProQuest Theses and Dissertations, EBSCO Academic Search Premier, EBSCO Business Source Complete, EBSCO e-books Collection and BLIS). We hope to see more online databases and journals subscribed by the Ministry because this initiate will reduce a lot of cost rather than each institutions subscribed by our own.


Institution Name:		UNIVERSITI KEBANGSAAN MALAYSIA LIBRARY
Institution Type:		Government Agency
Contact Person:		SHAMSUDIN IBRAHIM
Title:		MR
Telephone/ Fax:		60389213241 (TEL) / 60389256067 (FAX)
Institution's / Project's Website:		http://www.eklik.ukm.my/jetp
E-mail:		sham_ib@ukm.my
Address:		RESEARCHES SERVICES DIVISION, UKM LIBRARY
Postal Code:		43650
City:		BANGI
State/Province:		SELANGOR
Country:		Malaysia

The Problem

Solution and Key Benefits

Actors and Stakeholders

(a) Strategies

(b) Implementation

(c) Overcoming Obstacles

(d) Use of Resources

Sustainability and Transferability

Lessons Learned

Contact Information