Hi,

I recently commented to the help desk at ingenta that sometimes when
accessing journals through ingenta select that I was sure that sometimes
I was not able to gain access to the full text of journals to which we
subscribed, and that the subs icon was not always appearing next to the
journals content. Sometimes there was no content showing for a journal,
but at other times there was. At that time I had no evidence, as the
problem appeared to be intermittent, and was difficult to replicate.

A few weeks ago I reported a problem to ingenta regarding some problems
with accessing Journal of Sports Sciences, a subscribed titles of ours,
through Ingenta Select, this time I was able to provide screen dumps of
the problems to ingenta. The first problem was that sometimes when going
to this particular journal on Ingenta Select no contents i.e. volumes,
issues were displayed. The next problem was that the available content
for this journal was different on Ingenta compared to Ingenta Select, on
Ingenta there hadn't been any issues loaded for this title since
February 2001.

I did receive a response from ingenta saying this was a problem with the
MetaPress data which wasn't yet available at the host site.

Yesterday two of our researchers reported that they were being denied
access to full text articles from Memory, a subscribed title of ours,
that they wanted to download. One of them had been able to look at the
articles earlier, but when the other went to download the articles for
retention they were denied access. When I went to Ingenta Select to see
what was happening, I could see the subs icons next to the issues and I
was able to download full text articles. However, when one of my
colleagues tried to access Memory on Ingenta Select this morning, there
were no subs icons next to the issues.

Now I know Ingenta Select uses a number of servers, is it possible that
not all the servers are updated with the same information which may
explain why sometimes we can see the subs icon next to our
subscriptions, but at other times not?

Both these journals are Taylor and Francis journals, is there a
connection here?...or is this problem affecting other publishers?

Whatever is going on here, it is bound to cause some confusion and
irritation amongst our users, especially when the problem is so
difficult to replicate, unless you are lucky that the user managed to
keep a screen dump of the problem as proof, which doesn't normally
happen. These problems also make it difficult for our helpdesk staff,
who may have users telling them there is a problem, but then can't see
any evidence that this is happening when they go onto the Ingenta Select
web site.

At least I know that I wasn't hallucinating!!  Has anyone else out there
experienced similar problems? Can Ingenta provide some explanation for
these incidents?

Cheers
Lesley


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Lesley Crawshaw, Faculty Information Consultant,
Learning and Information Services,
University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, AL10 9AB UK
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e-mail: [log in to unmask]
phone:  01707 284662      fax: 01707 284666
web: http://www.herts.ac.uk/lis/subjects/natsci/ejournal/
list owner: [log in to unmask]
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