Hi,
Once upon a time I used to think that once access had been set up to a
subscription on IngentaConnect, then the only thing you needed to worry
about was checking that the access to the content for the new subscription
year was working OK. How naïve I was! From what I can see this is no longer
the case, now one can lose total access or partial access to subscriptions
for no apparent reason and without any warning and to make it worse at any
time of the year!
We’ve suffered no end of problems with access to many titles on
IngentaConnect this year, in fact I've never known a more frustrating year
than this!
Some of the problems appear to relate to the same old problems of being
allocated new subscriber numbers for no apparent reason. Some of the
problems can be traced back to Turpin (who some publishers use as their
subscription fulfilment agent) allocating new subscriber numbers to our
subscriptions, without even thinking that this might have a knock-on effect
on our online access. Other problems appear to relate to publishers files
not being able to be matched up to the correct institution.
Whilst I am not blaming Ingenta for all these problems, it is about time
that someone took responsibility for getting these issues resolved once and
for all, before a number of us librarians are carted off to the "funny
farm". As more and more of us are going online only, we really can't have
our subscriptions going up and down like a yo-yo! Journals are one of the
few resources that are paid for in advance of their publication, it seems
that sometimes that we are not getting anything for that money.
There is hardly a publisher on IngentaConnect that we haven't some kind of
problems with this year.
Since many of us might use usage statistics to evaluate which subscriptions
are worth keeping, there may be journals that get cancelled because of low
usage statistics, where the reason the usage statistics are so low is that
we haven't had access to those particular journals because of
afore-mentioned problems.
Just to illustrate today we uncovered the fact that we'd lost all our access
to the Journal of Agricultural Economics - we've had access to this ever
since it first appeared on ingenta back in 2002. It was working until quite
recently, but now all our access has disappeared. The publisher is now
trying to get this resolved for us.
I can't wait for 2006!
Cheers
Lesley
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Lesley Crawshaw, Faculty Information Consultant
Learning and Information Services
University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, AL10 9AB
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email: [log in to unmask]
phone: 01707 284662 fax: 01707 284666
list owner: [log in to unmask]
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