Forget ‘static’ ‐ get ‘dynamic’! Using Active Server Pages to manage electronic resources
| Date | 01 September 2001 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/03055720010804122 |
| Pages | 27-35 |
| Published date | 01 September 2001 |
| Author | Philip James Brabban,Paul Kobasa |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
VINE 124 — 27
Forget ‘static’ – get
‘dynamic’! Using
Active Server Pages
to manage electronic
resources
by Philip James Brabban and Paul
Kobasa, University of Durham
As ac ademic l ibrar ies s ubs cribe to a
growing number of elec tronic resources,
tradit iona l sta tic H TML page s are bec oming
incre asingly u nman agea ble. This artic le
desc ribes Dur ham U nive rsity Libr ary’ s
efforts to crea te da tabas e-d rive n dyn ami c
web p ages whi ch en able the u ser t o loc ate
the re sources they need whi lst al so
remaining managea ble for library staff.
Introduction
The University of Durham is a busy research and
teaching community covering a wide range of
subjects attracting high quality entrants. The
Library is one of the academic support services
within the University. It operates on four sites and
has around 140 employees, many of whom work
on a part -time ba sis. Th e staff are arr anged i n a
number of teams with staff being drawn from
Systems and Information Services groups to
develop the backend database described below,
which was a major component of an overall web
site re-launch in September 2001.
The problem
Electronic resources are increasing in number.
E-journals, bibliographic databases, online ency-
clopaedia - these aren’t the traditional print-based
sources that librarians can simply label and make
available to users by placing on shelves. Indeed,
as the proliferation of electronic resources contin-
ues, academic libraries are discovering that their
users are favouring the immediacy of the electronic
medium over print.
As our collections of subscribed electronic re-
sources grow, so the problems facing librarians
grow also. How do we enable access to these
resources in a way that combines usability for our
patrons and manageability for our staff?
Preliminary work with dynamic
web pages
Library web sites have become increasingly
important in providing a route linking the user to
the resource. However, the number of links that
need to be maintained becomes swiftly unmanage-
able. Durham University Library recognised this
potential problem in 1999 when, as well as provid-
ing general listings of links to over 200
bibliographic electronic resources on our web
pages by title, the need for additional pages listing
the same 200 resources by subject was expressed.
This was a sensible suggestion that was potentially
of great use to our patrons, however the mainte-
nance of these sets of static web pages would be
problematic and time consuming. A more manage-
able solution was sought and as a result we
developed a small database-driven area of our web
site that employed ‘dynamic’ web pages, which
enabled users to list online bibliographic materials
by a chosen subject. We had created 3 ‘dynamic’
web pages that, as far as the user was concerned,
produced exactly the same results as if we had
created over 30 ‘static ’ HTML pages . Through th e
use of dynamic web pages we had vastly cut down
the maintenance that was required, making the area
more manageable for staff.
Main development
At Durham, web pages are the main gateway to the
Library’s online materials. The recent exponential
growth of electronic journal subscriptions at the
Library meant that the maintenance of static
HTML pages was swiftly becoming problematic.
This led to the decision to expand our initial
success with dynamic pages to include electronic
journals. The problems associated with e-journals
were similar to those we faced when developing
our preliminary dynamic pages for online re-
sources, only on a far greater scale. S tatic pages
were being maintained both for an alphabetic
listing of titles, and a subject listing of the same
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