Tutorial:  Setting Up LinkOut for Libraries

Thank you for choosing to participate in LinkOut.  This tutorial is intended as a visual companion to the document LinkOut and Library Holdings.  In this tutorial, you will learn to:

• Set up a LinkOut account.
• Complete library identity information.
• Enter library holdings.
• Display your icon.
• Tips and tricks.

To navigate through the tutorial, click on any link in the blue section to the left of the screen or use the "Next Section" and "Previous Section" links at the bottom of each page

Read over the documentation before you begin.  On the LinkOut website, select Library Submission from the left sidebar.  This will open the Library Submission page. 

1. Read LinkOut and Library Holdings.
2. Read the Library FAQ.

You will need a list of holdings, with volumes and/or years, arranged alphabetically or by provider.  The following steps will help you get ready:

• Discuss LinkOut with the library staff, including the serials department. 
• Assign a LinkOut contact to enter and maintain holdings.
• Look at your electronic full-text subscription agreements.
• Develop a list of vendor or publisher names with titles and years supplied.
• Contact providers to join or add holdings, if necessary.

When you organize your holdings most should be easy to figure out.  There may also be a few confusing situations.  Here are a couple examples of more difficult situations: 

• Sometimes the provider is not obvious:
  If you subscribe to New England Journal of Medicine through Ovid, list Ovid as your provider.  However, if you subscribe directly to New England Journal of Medicine online, the provider is HighWire.  Usually the information can be found in the documentation, or you can contact the provider and ask.



• Sometimes one journal has multiple providers:
  When you are organizing your holdings, it is good to keep in mind that you may choose multiple providers.  You may receive the Journal of Advanced Nursing through both Ebsco and Ovid.  If you do choose both for the same year range, the link will be to the provider that comes first in the LinkOut priority.

  LinkOut is set up in the priority PubMed Central (PMC), publisher, aggregator. If you choose more than one provider, LinkOut will check first to see if one of the providers is PMC. If it is, your icon will link to the PMC version of the article. If the article is not in PMC, LinkOut will check to see if you chose one or more publishers for the article. If multiple publishers are selected, your icon will link to the first publisher in alphabetical order. If no publisher is selected, LinkOut will go to the aggregator you selected. If multiple aggregators are selected, your icon will link to the first one listed in alphabetical order

  Regardless of how many providers you select, you will have only one icon displayed and one link to the full-text.

You can also display your library's print holdings in LinkOut. For more information on this, see the section Enter Print Holdings.

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