Hi,
On the 8th of January 2004 I received an email from ingenta saying Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates journals will no longer be available via ingenta, but via
the publisher's new site at: http://www.leaonline.com. The email told us to
go to the new LEA Online site and enter our unique activation code*
(included in your LEA letter**). We were also told that if we had received
multiple activation codes/letters from LEA, to complete the process outlined
in tne email to activate each one separately. **If we had not received a
letter from LEA, we were told to use the LEA account number located on the
mailing label of your print subscription. The latter wouldn't have been any
help to us as we went online only from 2003! The letters finally made their
way to the appropriate person and she set up our access. However, we found
that we didn't have full access to all the content we were entitled to.
After contacting LEA we were able to get this sorted.
We've finally sorted everything out at our end, but we find that we now have
two accounts for LEA Online, partly because some of our subscriptions had
the 2002 issues under a different account number. We don't know why. We've
asked if these two accounts can be merged, but we've been told this may not
be feasible at present. One of the consequences of us now having two account
numbers is that we will have to look at two lots of usage data, subscription
data etc...
Now, don't get me wrong. I do realise that when new services come online,
there are bound to be some "teething" problems. New services are a learning
experience for all those involved. However, this requires that more advance
warning is needed, so that our users are not inconvenienced by loss of
online access, and so that those responsible for administering ejournal
subscriptions at institutions have time to do the necessary work to make the
changes.
What really surprised me was that although the old content still remains (or
appears to remain) on ingenta select, all our access - access that we've had
ever since 2000 has been terminated. I did contact ingenta and was told that
there shouldn't be any Lawrence Erlbaum Associates content on
Ingenta/Ingenta Select. That's not what it looks like to a user - it looks
like there is content, but we no longer have any access. I've checked each
of our 8 LEA subscriptions and they all appear to still be on ingenta
select. Maybe the servers haven't yet all been updated and the LEA journals
removed?
Surely some transition arrangement should have been put in place, similar to
the gracing periods that we ask for in relation to electronic journal
subscriptions. We should have been able to continue to access pre 2004
content for this publisher via ingenta select for a short period of time.
This would have allowed librarians time to get familiar with the new service
and get any problems ironed out before all access was moved to the new LEA
Online service, and our catalogues etc. updated with this new information.
The other thing that publishers need to recognise is that librarians are
dealing with a large number of different publishers, not just one. We are
often working through a large list of other unresolved queries, and can't
always put everything else on hold for a change such as this. In the last
week we've had to make a whole pile of changes for our electronic journals
and we've only been back to work for a week - and what a week it was!!
I hope this all makes sense!
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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