Ingenta, the technology provider which connects the publishing and information industries, recently announced the latest phase in its strategy for providing services in China, on behalf of its 250 publisher customers.
At the heart of the new approach is an emphasis on localised support; Ingenta’s customer service team will be extended to include dedicated staff in China to provide tailored assistance to users of the IngentaConnect platform. The site’s current support materials are being translated into Chinese, and will be extended to address the particular requirements of this user group. Meanwhile, the unique access requirements created by the market’s funding model will be further met by developments to IngentaConnect’s search engine, which will filter out non-subscribed content from users’ search results and return only records with immediately accessible full text. Future developments include the provision of a Chinese interface to IngentaConnect, additional search performance optimisation, and more contextual help for administrative functions around the site such as those undertaken by librarians.
Much of the work is being undertaken in collaboration with The Charlesworth Group. The Group’s Beijing based subsidiary, Charlesworth China, is one of the leading agents for promotion of licences to access online content in China, and has already secured deals for a number of customers with content hosted by IngentaConnect. Charlesworth China will carry out translation work and support Ingenta’s Chinese customer service representative.
Ingenta has offered China-specific services since 2000; many of the company’s publisher partners have taken advantage of its local servers, which enable Chinese institutions to avoid the international bandwidth charges associated with non-local full text downloads. Ingenta’s Chinese servers were most recently upgraded in July 2006 and moved onto the CERNET network to improve performance, security and resilience.
Ingenta and Google Scholar: the next generation
It has also been announced that Ingenta is the first scholarly hosting service to make its library holdings data available to Google Scholar, enabling the search tool to implement prominent 'appropriate copy' links for patrons of the more than 25,000 libraries that use IngentaConnect to access e-journals. Existing links from Google Scholar to IngentaConnect will be expanded to indicate whether the current user has access rights.
"Google should be commended for further developing Scholar to meet the needs of libraries and their users. We’re pleased to support their appropriate linking capabilities, and proud that we’re the first organisation they’ve come to for the holdings data which enables such functionality," commented IngentaConnect Product Development Manager Kirsty Meddings. "Studies shows that a high proportion of researchers use Google Scholar as a key discovery service for academic literature. As online content providers, we need to reach out to those users. It’s important to ensure that the services they choose to use are as geared to their needs as possible, and are supporting their access needs by directing them on to the appropriate information sources."
With development work underway, Full Text@IngentaConnect links will appear in Google Scholar search results in the short-term future. The new arrangement will also see Ingenta informing Google of articles which can be freely accessed via IngentaConnect; appropriate links can also be provided for these articles, thus highlighting additional open access content to users.
