Some Euro Info Centres are being inconvenienced by the late despatch of the
monthly OJ L&C CD-ROM. Are other relays also suffering from this?
The OJs are available on EUR-Lex for about 2 months (45 working days). This
is supposed to be sufficient to cover the period until the monthly CD-ROM
arrives. But the CD is often sent out late. This month was particularly
bad, with most language versions of the January-March CD-ROM not being
despatched unti 19 May. The March OJs started to disappear from EUR-Lex on
4 May. So by the time subscribers received the CD-ROM this week, they had
had no access to some of the March OJs for around 3 weeks. This seems
totally unacceptable in the light of promises made when relays were forced
to accept the switch of their free OJ subscriptions from paper to CD-ROM.
The delay in despatching the CD-ROM is not normally as severe as this, but
it does happen fairly consistently. The obvious solution is to extend the
availability of the OJs on EUR-Lex from 45 days to, say, 60 days. But EUR-OP
says that it has abandoned this idea and can give no definite information on
when an improvement in the despatch dates can be expected.
The problem probably does not affect those who have taken out a subscription
to the paper version, or those who receive the English, French or German
version of the CD-ROM (these are often despatched earlier than the rest).
But that still leaves a substantial number (about half the EICs, for
example) who are being poorly served.
I should be interested to hear from anyone who has experienced this problem
and would like to support a call for immediate action to deal with it.
Regards,
Chris Lamb
Documentation Officer
Technical Assistance Office
Euro Info Centre Network
70 rue Montoyer
B-1000 Bruxelles
Tel: +32 2 287 1553
Fax: +32 2 230 0520
Email: [log in to unmask]
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