The team and its work

STL: from library space to improved service

The 74th anniversary of the JINR Science and Technology Library was celebrated this year. It is older than the Institute because it was founded at the Hydrotechnical Laboratory of the USSR Academy of Sciences, on the basis of which JINR was later established. Today, as in all years of its existence, STL takes into account the needs of all categories of users: researchers, engineers, graduate students, students and thinks through how it can help them in research and educational work, what services will allow them to find quickly and conveniently the required sources of information. There are resources for this that no other department has. A conversation with colleagues about achievements and hopes is led by Irina LEONOVICH.

Libraries, including scientific ones, today perform many functions. What do you think helps you to move forward?

Head of the library Elena IVANOVA: First of all, we are grateful to the Directorate of the Institute, of BLTP and VBLHEP for the completely updated library space. The premises were renovated not only in the Central Library at BLTP, but also at the STL branch at VBLHEP. It determined a new stage in the development of the JINR STC and promoted its activities to a higher level. And most importantly, reading rooms, subscriptions and virtual space - the library website, electronic catalog, electronic resources - nothing will work without specialists. All staff, all departments of the library - the reader service group, the reference and bibliographic group, the processing and cataloging group try to work competently and harmoniously for the convenience, comfort and prompt provision of services to visitors. The work of our programmers, MLIT employees and our markup consultants greatly contributes to progress. The employees of the Publishing Department have also provided us with many years of invaluable assistance - binding of old valuable publications, publication of bibliographic indexes and lists, advertising materials, printing of posters and announcements for literature exhibitions and others. The development of the library would be impossible without sufficient funding. I know what difficulties the scientific libraries of the RAS system experience. Many thanks to Directorate of the Institute that we still have the opportunity to stock the library with books, magazines, electronic resources. We hope that we will have this opportunity in the future.

Leading librarian Lyudmila LEVUSHKINA: Without a doubt, time poses new challenges for scientific libraries; a peculiar transformation takes place both in the library itself and in our profession. We try to develop the trend towards modern information services; our specialists know how to work with digital resources, databases and library systems.

Can you tell us more about bibliographic work - the alpha and omega of library life?

Chief bibliographer Valentina LITSITIS: We try to do everything to ensure that our readers receive reliable bibliographic data. Today, the main thing for us is to understand the technologies for delivering the required quality information to the reader. For many years, we have been engaged in analytical writing of magazine articles; we publish bibliographic indexes of the papers of JINR employees, the first issue of which was published in 1966 and covered the papers of JINR employees for ten years (1956-1966). Subsequently, such signs have become annual. They are available on the STL website in the "Services" section; many bibliographic descriptions are provided with links to the full texts of publications. Publications by the Institute's staff can be found in the electronic catalogue. The search result is a bibliographic list that can be printed and saved. You can search by author, type of publication, date, subject headings, and so on. I would like to note that all publications, before being included in the electronic catalog, must be marked up, that is, receive a thematic index in accordance with the STL classification scheme. The JINR staff and marking consultants help us with it: E.N.Dubovik, N.N.Arseniev, V.A.Andreev. We are very short of specialists in certain areas. Taking this opportunity, we would like to invite interested scientists to our library to mark up scientific articles.

We also compile biobibliographies of scientists. Recently, I have prepared a bibliographic list of B. Pontecorvo's publication - checking data from primary sources "de visu" (a bibliographic term meaning that information about the publication was gleaned not from bibliographic sources, but from direct, visual acquaintance - Ed.., excluding papers, not belonging to the author, finding new sources, links in articles and search, search, search...

We also hold such a project - "Publications about JINR", as well as the database "Literature about JINR scientists". You can find out about them on the STL website lib.jinr.ru with a user-friendly interface and convenient search in Russian and English. We also provide data on scientometric indicators from the Web of Science, Scopus and Russian Science Citation Index databases to analyze the publication activity of organizations and authors.

Do you still have access to the resources of foreign scientific publishing houses and scientometric databases?

E.I.: There are problems here... For many years, we have subscribed to foreign magazines and books through the company EBSCO Information Services (Berlin), but today, it has become impossible. It has been possible to order only a few journals of importance for JINR from the Singapore publishing house World Scientific through the Russian organization "World of Periodicals". It is very pleasing that the Russian Centre for Scientific Information managed to conclude agreements with some foreign publishing houses and within the framework of a centralized National subscription for JINR in 2023, the resources of the main publishing houses important for our Institute were opened: APS, Springer (not only journals, but also books), Wiley, Questel SAS, Nature, Science journals, AMS MathSciNet database. Unfortunately, the journals of the publishing house "Elsevier" were not included in the centralized National subscription, therefore, except for Open Access articles, articles from Elsevier journals published in 2019-2023 are not available. Issues of 2018 and earlier should be open to JINR, since the Institute purchased them.

V.L.: There is a difficult situation with access to the main bibliometric databases Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. Unfortunately, for Russia, in the bibliometric databases WoS, since 1 May, 2022 and in Scopus since 1 January, 2023, data for analyzing the publication activity of the organization has not been available. But I would like to draw attention to the fact that authors still have the opportunity to obtain data on the analysis of the author's publishing activities in WoS and Scopus. Since May 2022, the Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI) has not been able to make queries directly to the WoS and Scopus databases and to obtain from there the current values of publication citation indicators. WoS has open services, for example, author profiles of researchers with the ability to search by author, Master Journal List, others. Open services are available only after registering with WoS. Scopus also has open services - search by author and list of sources. Unlike WoS, where while searching by author the user sees all the author's publications, in Scopus only the author's 10 most recent publications are visible.

To search for scientific information, you can also use the following open foreign resources - BASE (base-search.net), CORE (core.ac.uk), Google Scholar (scholar.google.com), PubMed (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih. gov), Dimensions (app.dimensions.ai/discover/publication), Crossref (search.crossref.org), Lens (www.lens.org), OpenAlex (openalex.org), ScienceGate (www.sciencegate.app), Semantic Scholar (www.semanticscholar.org), ResearchGate (www.researchgate.net). Mendeley (www.mendeley.com/search), Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) (doaj.org), DOI (www.doi.org), Scimago Journal & Country Rank (www.scimagojr.com), ORCID (orcid .org).

Listening to you, I understand that today, librarians are "information surfers" and "data divers" that can work with new types of information, find, formulate and deliver the required data from open and closed sources...

Senior librarian Irina SHILINA: Of course! Very often, readers turn to us with such a link to the desired publication and it is not clear whether it is a book, an article from a collection or journal, a preprint, a report. You literally have to "dive" into the Internet, go to search engines, catalogs of other libraries and publishing houses and databases. If we don't have the required publication, we try to somehow "catch" it on the Internet, or order it from other libraries.

It is exciting, creative work and today, it motivates us to find a way out of seemingly hopeless situations. We find an individual approach to each reader. Very often, readers ask to send them a publication that is in the library in electronic form. This is understandable; many people want to read at their workplace without coming to the library, especially if it is an article or a preprint. At the request of readers, we scan book or magazine articles and send them by email. In addition, we have already scanned all JINR preprints and news. They are posted in the electronic catalogue, with a link to the full text attached to their descriptions. So, we try to satisfy users' information requests as fully as possible. It is especially pleasant to receive gratitude from readers for prompt, qualified work.

V.L.: We have unusually interesting activities, a kind of "diving" - a mode of deep immersion into the analytical processing of articles. The papers of employees of the Institute are published in various publishing houses, the question is: how to "find them out"? Each publishing house has its own search by organization. And today, some publishing houses have completely stopped indicating the authors' affiliation with Russian organizations, especially for international collaborations. We have to find ways to solve these problems and this is not easy.

What about replenishing traditional funds?

E.I.: Every year, it becomes more difficult. Traditionally, we are stocked in the Library of Natural Sciences (back in the early 1960s, M.G.Meshcheryakov agreed with the USSR Academy of Sciences that we would receive new scientific books from the LNS). But today, unfortunately, we get not many books from there. We mainly buy books from publishing houses such as "Fizmatlit", "Lan", URSS, others. We have to look through the price lists of publishing houses, looking for books on our topic, like grains of gold, in heaps of publishing lists. It is painstaking and not always rewarding work.

L.L.: Many books are currently published on applied, purely technical disciplines. There are not many publications on fundamental problems of physics and on the topics of our Institute. There are a lot of re-releases, often stereotypical ones.

What is the JINR Science and Technology Library today?

E.I.: This is an integral part of the Institute that helps it to become stronger, better, more extensively involved in global research work, a space that allows it to realize its potential and show its creative component.

L.L.: Our scientific library should remain a centre of attraction for Institute staff members, graduate students, students and researchers, where they can find answers to many questions both in terms of education and science.

E.I.: We take a wide position, are open to the whole world, changes and transformations. I must say that we try to make sure that the library is perceived not only as a reference department, but also as a place for research and scientific work of the Institute's employees and guests, so that the book fund and all our capabilities as an information and analytical centre are more widely used.

We hope that the library and our profession will always be in demand!