Integrating journal back files into an existing electronic environment

When we purchased two collections of journal back files for hosting locally we knew that there would be some work involved in providing them to our patrons as a usable service. The key task we faced was to get our final solution neatly integrated into our existing electronic environment. We did not want our patrons to have to go to a stand-alone search page when they could use our federated search engine. We wanted our OpenURL resolver to be able to link patrons to the article whether they found it via our federated search engine or another resource that supports OpenURLs. We also wanted people to be able to link straight to an article or a journals index so that lecturers could add specific articles to their reading lists. Finally we knew that we needed to supply a browsable index for the whole of each collection of back files.