To add to Lesley's comment about lack of communication from Kluwer, some
time last year Kluwer added new servers on their system and although
journals' home and content pages are still on the original server at
www.kluweronline.com
abstracts and PDF files appear to have moved to different servers
ipsapp00x.lwwonline.com (where x is a numeral e.g. 7, 8, 9 etc.)
The change did not affect our on-campus users but we use a proxy server
which requires domain names of hosts to be on the permissions list. The
first time we discovered about additional servers was (you guessed it!)
when an off-site user called to report that he could no longer access full
text of Kluwer journals.
Compare this with another vendor (CSA) which informed users in their email
newsletter when they added mirror servers in the US so sites with proxy
servers could update their permissions list in advance.
Like Lesley we (and our users) also find Kluwer's journal homepages less
than helpful. The homepage of each journal includes a cover image and it
is immediately clear which journal a user is looking at. Unfortunately
the only other information on this page is subscription information. The
journal contents page on the other hand simply has the title at the top
and a list of available issues (linked to contents lists) below. We
decided to link from our OPAC to the journal's homepage in the hope that
users would see and click the journal contents link but ideally we would
like to see both the cover image and a list of available volumes/years on
the same page.
While we are on the topic of communication how do other sites find
messages from Springer Verlag telling you that some (unspecified) new
titles are now accessible in LINK? How are we supposed to know which
titles? I've been meaning to contact Springer to remind them it would be
helpful if they could tell us which titles are new but since I seem to
delete these messages on receipt I don't have any example to quote (and
they may not know which message I'm referring to!)
Enough gripe for now...
On Wed, 29 Jan 2003, Lesley Crawshaw wrote:
> Quite by accident (isn't that always the way?), when trying to get ready
> for the transfer of Kluwer Law International titles from KluwerOnline to
> the new publisher's site (but that's another story), I noticed that many
> Kluwer journals where the backfiles had previously only gone back a few
> years to e.g. 1999 or 2000, seemed to have had additional content added,
> in many cases back to 1997 or 1998. It is clear from looking at the
> contents pages that this retrospective addition of backfiles is
> currently in process because in many cases there are only bits and
> pieces of volumes there.
>
> Now, whilst I welcome the addition of more online content, I would have
> preferred that I had received some communication from the publisher to
> this effect, at least to make us aware that this was happening. However,
> my experience over the past few years is that Kluwer has been and is
> still seriously lacking in the area of communication of changes etc. to
> its customers. To date I have received no information from Kluwer about
> this addition of backfiles. What makes it more difficult is that there
> is no easy way to be sure that just because the backfiles have been
> added that we have rights to access the full text, unlike ScienceDirect
> or Synergy there is nothing to indicate to users which titles they have
> access to and which they don't. This means that the only way to be sure
> that we do have access is to open a full text file for the earliest
> issues of each of these journals, thereby adding to our ejournal
> statistics!! So far I have had to make over 50 changes to holdings
> because of this, and I am still not even halfway through this task.
[snip]
> Anybody else out there got anything they would like to add, or am I
> being unfair to Kluwer?
Mieko
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Mieko Yamaguchi [log in to unmask]
Technical Services Manager/System Coordinator +44 (0)1248 382970
Main Library, University of Wales Bangor, UK +44 (0)1248 382979 (Fax)
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