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Andrew, Hi. Emma and I at Aston are just in the last phases of adding our e-journal links to the catalogue. As you probably know Aston does not use Talis so the technical problems you may encounter will be different but I thought I would offer some info anyway and you can ask for more if you want to. Feel free to ask us anything at all about e-journals and how to cope with the stress!!! The major issue we had was deciding which bit of the journal or web site to link to. For example, we have a subscription to Proquest but they do not allow us to link to the journal table of contents. We had to decide whether to have a link to the Proquest database URL on the catalogue or link to the library web pages about the database. We use 2 database URLs at the moment. 1 for on campus which logs in via IP address and 1 for off campus which automatically links to the Athens login page. Neither of these links have been really stable over the last few years so we currently link to our "More About" web page for Proquest. So worry number one - make sure you know that the URL you are about to add to the catalogue is a stable URL. If the URL is going to change every year you could be in for a lot of work on a regular basis. We also made a decision to put only one URL link on the catalogue. For example if the journal is available via Emerald and Proquest and JSTOR we will only have a web link to the database with the earliest and most current holdings and provide holdings information for the rest of the services. If a title is embargoed we will put that information on the catalogue record. For example our JSTOR titles are often embargoed for 3 or 5 years so we will write next to the holdings information [last 5 years unavailable online] I know that there are services like Serials Solutions and TDNet that will keep your e-journal holdings up to date and will alert you to changes in title and ceased publications and which journals are available on which databases. However, these services are too expensive for us and we are not confident that they provide factually correct information and whether it is done quick enough. Emma and I have also created a spreadsheet of everything that we currently have in stock whether it is a print journal or an electronic journal or both. The spreadsheet tells us the journal title, ISSN, the publisher, all the databases we can access the journal in full text and the holdings. We are also recording whether the journal has free electronic access with a print subscription, changes of name, ceased titles etc. This spreadsheet we are putting in to an Access database so that eventually the library staff can access it and be able to produce lists of journal titles. Examples include everything we have from Academic Press or everything we have in print and electronic etc. It has been an incredibly hard slog but at least we know we have an up to date record of where a journal is available electronically or in the library. I could go on but I will leave it at that as I am sure that you have had a multitude of responses! Good Luck Nicola Dennis At 15:02 28/07/2003 +0100, you wrote: > We are currently struggling with the issue of maintaining our > catalogue records for electronic journals. As we currently don't have the > resources to bulk upload MARC records from the publishers, we have > decided to add titles individually onto Talis, from which we hope to > generate a workable a-z list of titles which we can then host on our web site. > > Does anybody out there have any sage advice on the subject, any > magic tricks to make life easier or any warnings of things to avoid at > all costs? If any other Talis libraries can share any workable > solutions to the problem, this would be much appreciated. > > >Andrew Sayer >Serials Librarian >University of Central England ********************************************** Nicola Dennis Business Information Specialist Library and Information Services Telephone:0121 359 3611 ext 4405 Fax:0121 359 7358 Aston University Aston Library and Information Services Aston Triangle Birmingham B4 7ET England **********************************************