Hi,
Has anyone manage to get detailed and accurate subscriptions information
from Ingenta? I requested this and was sent an excel file which on first
sight looked really useful. On closer examination it was full of holes.
Some titles were triplicated with range dates that didn't match, some had
no start/end dates, some had end dates but no start dates, etc. When I
queried this I was told it was the publishers' fault because their files
were inconsistent in the way they represented dates.
The most glaring problem was that a very large number of titles had a
start date of 1990 which seemed too good to be true. When I checked some
of these not one had full text available from 1990. When I asked about
this I was told it was just a default date used to mean 'from the earliest
available electronic content'. Why not use 1753 or 3027 since this would
be just as useless? Actually these dates would be preferable since they
would be obviously incorrect.
How is it other journal host services can produce detailed subscription
lists but Ingenta can't?
Regards,
John Smith,
The Templeman Library,
University of Kent, UK.
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