REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL
RFP #M 0150
Issue Date: January 5, 1998
Title: Electronic Full Text Databases
Issuing Agency: Commonwealth of Virginia
James Madison University
Procurement Services
One Court Square MSC8502
Harrisonburg, VA 22807
Using Agency: Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA)
Sealed Proposals Will Be Received Until February 10, 1998, 3 PM, For Furnishing The Services Described Herein.
IF PROPOSALS ARE MAILED, SEND DIRECTLY TO THE ISSUING AGENCY SHOWN ABOVE. IF PROPOSALS ARE HAND DELIVERED, DELIVER TO: One Court Square, Third Floor, Room 300, Harrisonburg, VA 22807.
All Inquiries For Information Should Be Directed To: Iris Moubray, C.P.M., VCO, Senior Buyer, (Phone) 540/568-3132 (Fax) 540/568-7935.
In compliance with this Proposal and to all the conditions imposed herein, the undersigned offers and agrees to furnish the goods/services in accordance with the attached signed proposal or as mutually agreed upon by subsequent negotiation.
Name and Address of Firm: ______
______
______
By: ______
Signature in Ink
Name: ______
Please Print
Title: ______
FEI/FIN No.______Phone: ______
Date: ______Fax #:______
I. PURPOSE
The purpose of this Request for Proposal (RFP) is to solicit sealed proposals from qualified sources to establish contract(s) through competitive negotiations for the Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA) to provide access to electronic full text databases covering a broad range of disciplines.
Specific objectives include:
(1) Providing databases with full text articles and indexing from high quality publications with coverage including, but not necessarily limited to the following categories: humanities, social sciences, sciences, business, health, computers, technology and general interest.
(2) Providing a robust and user friendly search engine which operates efficiently and effectively with standard WWW browsers.
(3) Providing Internet access to database(s) loaded and maintained by the contractor(s).
II. BACKGROUND
The Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA) is a consortium of the libraries of the colleges and universities of the Commonwealth of Virginia. VIVA's mission is to provide, in an equitable, cooperative, and cost effective manner, enhanced access to library and information resources for the Commonwealth of Virginia's academic libraries serving the higher education community.
VIVA has two main areas of activities: 1) activities to enhance support of interlibrary lending among the libraries; and 2) shared access to online library resources. Projects to support interlibrary lending include purchasing and installing Ariel system for the electronic transmission of articles and developing protocols and procedures to achieve a 48-hour response standard for interlibrary lending requests within the Commonwealth. Projects to support shared access to online library resources include collective subscriptions to remote, online databases; purchase or lease of online databases to be locally mounted by one or more of the six electronic resource center libraries (and made available to the other member libraries); and digitization projects.
From the beginning of the VIVA consortium, the libraries of the Commonwealth's independent (private, not-for-profit) colleges and universities have participated to the maximum extent feasible. In all cases from 1994 to the present, a subset of the private institutions participated in VIVA purchases using their own funds. During the 1998-2000 Biennium, additional funds may be made available by the Virginia General Assembly for the private institutions to participate more fully in database purchases.
The goal of the VIVA project is to use networked resources, client-server architecture, and a robust state-wide network, Net.Work.Virginia (http://www.NetworkVirginia.net), to make library resources accessible to participants. Institutions use a variety of protocols to access electronic materials, but the World Wide Web (HTTP protocol) is the preferred method of access. The speed of networked connections varies from institution to institution and campus to campus.
See Attachment B for a list of participating institutions, including total numbers of full-time equivalent (FTE) students.
III. STATEMENT OF NEEDS
The contractor shall clearly indicate in their responses if what they are proposing is in the general release, in testing, in development, in planning, not available, or is a custom development available for an additional charge. For proposed capabilities not currently available, the contractor shall indicate the scheduled date of release.
A. DATABASE DESCRIPTION AND COVERAGE
MANDATORY:
The contractor shall provide a description of the full contents of the database, indicating the coverage in each part of the database, e.g., type of material, dates of coverage, extent of coverage (full-text, abstracts, index citation). The description shall include an executive summary of the proposed services.
1. The contractor shall offer full-text databases which meet the following minimum criteria:
(a) Broad coverage of academic disciplines including the humanities, social sciences, sciences, business, computers, technology, health, and general interest;
(b) A minimum of three years of coverage. The contractor shall specify the years of coverage, indicating whether coverage is ongoing, or if coverage is based on a rolling subscription that deletes earlier years;
(c) Continuous updates on at least a weekly basis with daily updates preferred. The contractor shall specify the update schedule;
(d) Comprehensive indexing and abstracting of materials.
The contractor shall describe any other indexes and abstracts of periodical articles or other materials in addition to the full-text material.
3. The contractor shall provide a list of currently available journals covered in the database(s) including dates of coverage.
4. The contractor shall provide a separate list limited to only currently available full-text journal titles.
The contractor shall specify any materials (including illustrations, charts, brief articles, notes, covers, advertisements, etc.) omitted from the electronic full-text database.
The contractor shall clarify whether it is the database publisher, or a third party database provider, and shall describe its specific relationship to the database publisher. Contractors that are not the database publisher shall clarify their role in providing access to the proposed database(s), specify any restrictions in use, and detail any limitations from the database(s) available from the publisher.
The contractor shall describe the availability and access to any backfiles of materials, which extends coverage beyond the minimum criteria of three years.
The contractor shall describe the availability of non-periodical reference materials, e.g., dictionaries, encyclopedias, medical guides, company directories.
The contractor shall describe capabilities for displaying within the citation or adjacent to the citation, information on whether or not the local library owns the cited journal.
The contractor shall describe any mechanism for systematic, advance notification of changes in the database(s), i.e., additions and deletions of full-text coverage, etc.
DESIRABLE:
Online listing of full-text titles. The contractor should provide, in a readily accessible online format, a current and accurate list of full-text titles; the list should not include any other (non-full-text) titles.
B. SEARCH CAPABILITY
MANDATORY:
The contractor shall provide detailed information regarding the proposed system's search capabilities and on how search results are displayed.
DESIRABLE:
The contractor should offer:
1. Author, title, and subject search capability;
2. The ability to limit searching to full-text materials only;
3. The ability to limit searching by the following:
a. Date;
b. Language;
c. Country of publication;
d. Journal or source title;
e. Type of material;
4. Boolean operators;
5. Proximity searching;
6. The ability to limit searching by language;
7. The ability to limit searches to materials held by the local library;
8. The ability to limit searching to scholarly or refereed articles;
9. The ability to search multiple databases simultaneously;
10. Right-hand and internal (wildcard) truncation;
11. Keyword capability, including all conventional database records fields, including but not limited to author, article title, journal title, abstracts, descriptors, language, and year of publication;
12. Browsing of specific journal titles, by date or volume;
13. Browsing of major index fields;
14. Default records display in reverse chronological order;
15. Provision for marking records.
C. USER INTERFACE
MANDATORY:
The contractor shall provide a detailed description of the user interface, including menu and help screen design specifying availability of context sensitive and/or menu help functions. The contractor shall further describe support for customized help files.
D. PRINTING AND DOWNLOADING
MANDATORY:
1. The contractor shall describe all methods currently available for printing and downloading information and shall further detail any requirements for local printer configuration and specify how the service handles graphs, illustrations, etc.
2. The contractor shall offer at a minimum:
a. Display of citations and full-text articles on user's workstation;
b. Ability to print citations and full-text articles on attached or networked printers, as designated by the local institution;
c. Ability to download citations and full-text articles on local computers or disks.
DESIRABLE:
The contractor should offer:
1. Ability to deliver full-text via electronic mail;
2. Ability to deliver full-text to user's fax machine;
3. Ability to route requests to document delivery departments at respective institutions.
E. ACCESS
MANDATORY:
The contractor shall:
1. Provide access to the database via the World Wide Web, through the use of Netscape 3.0 and Internet Explorer 3.0, as well as later versions of these browsers.
2. Describe any other options for accessing databases.
3. Indicate any limitations in functionality based on method of access.
4. Describe any special requirements or clients, including plug-ins, needed to access databases.
5. Describe the minimum and maximum modem transfer speed required for connectivity by off-campus users.
DESIRABLE:
1. The contractor should provide access to sub-sections of the database, so that particular databases, journal titles and articles may be addressed individually. Each element should have a separate and permanent URL listing which libraries may use as a bookmark or Web link.
2. The contractor should offer VIVA the possibility of dedicated access to the database site.
F. FORMAT
MANDATORY:
The contractor shall specify the format of the database(s):
1. Indicate whether the database is text or image.
2. Indicate the type of image format (e.g., tiff, pdf).
3. Describe how records are tagged/indexed.
G. DATABASE CUSTOMIZING
MANDATORY:
The contractor shall describe any options for customizing services.
DESIRABLE:
The contractor should offer options to customize:
1. Searching, displays, print and download options;
2. Time-outs.
H. HOURS OF SERVICE
MANDATORY:
The contractor shall outline the hours of service and describe times, if any, that the service is not available. The contractor shall outline the times when maintenance is routinely performed.
DESIRABLE:
The contractor should offer access to the service twenty-four (24) hours per day, seven days a week.
I. AUTHENTICATION
MANDATORY:
Contractor shall detail the options available for registration/certification to allow qualified users access. The contractor shall:
1. Describe the login procedure.
2. Detail the levels of authorization required for access.
3. Specify levels of authorization controlled by the contractor and by the local institution.
4. Detail the use of IP addresses in authentication.
5. Specify what constitutes a qualified user.
6. Detail how the service identifies qualified users.
7. Specify any usage restrictions on the services.
8. Describe any restriction on concurrent usage and detail how usage in monitored.
9. Describe how the system handles passwords, including masking, character restrictions, minimum length of passwords, ability to script passwords, etc.
DESIRABLE:
The contractor should be able to provide a simple authentication process for access from all college computers and for all college affiliated users off campus or at home. The normal on-site process should not require the user to enter a password. The authentication process should work with a local or institution-specific system.
J. COPYRIGHT PERMISSION
MANDATORY:
1. The contractor shall specify current arrangements for handling copyright and royalty fees.
2. The contractor shall specify whether VIVA may use paper or electronic copies derived directly or indirectly from the electronic database with the same rights and limitations that apply to paper copies made from print publications in compliance with Sections 107 and 108 of the Copyright Act of the U.S. and with guidelines developed by the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU).
DESIRABLE:
The contractor should place no restrictions, beyond those of fair use, on interlibrary loan use of the database.
K. ARCHIVING
MANDATORY:
The contractor shall describe archiving methods used to ensure permanent and reliable access to databases.
DESIRABLE:
The contractor should archive all full-text materials and make them available to VIVA on a permanent basis.
L. RESPONSE TIME
MANDATORY:
The contractor shall provide detailed information on response time based on simultaneous use, including average response time per search during peak loads (defined as 50 simultaneous users) and maximum response time per search during peak loads.
DESIRABLE:
The contractor should be able to maintain adequate response time, defined as an average of two (2) seconds per search for 95% of all searches performed during peak loads (50 simultaneous users) and a maximum of five (5) seconds per search for 95% of all searches during peak loads.
M. TRAINING
MANDATORY:
The contractor shall describe nature and extent of training to be provided and provide proposed training schedule and sample training materials, if any.
DESIRABLE:
1. The contractor should provide training to library staff.
2. The contractor should provide a free mechanism for arranging additional ports or other access means to accommodate the high volume of use during periodic training sessions for students and faculty at each institution.
N. DOCUMENTATION
MANDATORY:
The contractor shall describe available user documentation and provide copies to VIVA to review
if requested.
O. MANAGEMENT REPORTS
MANDATORY:
The contractor shall describe the types of management reports that can be generated, including, but not limited to, use by institution, database, journal title, etc., as well as data on access contention, failures, etc. The contractor shall include sample management reports.
DESIRABLE:
1. Contractor should provide routine management reports at least monthly and customized reports as requested by VIVA.
2. The contractor should provide management reports to each library on a title by title basis, in a variety of accessible and flexible formats, e.g., spreadsheet, downloadable Web document.
P. MAINTENANCE
MANDATORY:
The contractor shall describe procedures for ongoing maintenance/support for the service. Contractor shall provide information on guaranteed response times for requests for maintenance/support.
DESIRABLE:
1. The contractor should provide maintenance support 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
2. The contractor should offer a toll free telephone number for maintenance calls and other support services.
Q. CONNECTIVITY