We have been doing our regular review of where we are with our ejournaldeals and I was a little perturbed to see how incomplete our provision is.
Of the 4500 titles we have, about 700 are listed with 'holdings incomplete'
because not all issues are yet available. There are also titles promised in
some deals that never appear in 2 years- or have been sold on to another
publisher before we even got a glimpse of them! Some examples are given
below- you will probably be familar with them and be able to add many more!
Difficulties often seem to be with publishers not supplying the aggregators.
Quality of provision, and the staff effort needed chasing suppliers - often
because of problems encountered by users - has been discussed here before in
general terms and in relation to specific publishers, but needs to be raised
again, since there seems to have been no improvement. We enter into legal
agreements with suppliers, but they do not seem to be keeping their side of
the bargain. I would appreciate a NESLI or DNER view on this.
Some examples.
Kluwer/NESLI 2001 deal
Offered 704 titles (approx)
Still chasing outstanding titles: at the moment we have 685 titles finally
available from this deal, 19 outstanding, 7 of which will never be available
to us as they have now changed publisher. Out of the 685 available to us
440 still have incomplete holdings. These are checked on a weekly basis to
see if new holdings have appeared as the new issue alerts aren't very
reliable.
OUP/NESLI deal
Lots of problems - we originally ordered a batch of 108 titles from various
subject clusters and requested access via ingenta. The titles subscribed to
have gradually appeared since May but very inconsistently. We have had to do
lots of checking and contacting ingenta and OUP etc. Some titles still ask
for payment. There's a batch of about 20 titles haven't been published
online yet, which we weren't aware of and so this required lots of chasing
trying to find out why they weren't available etc.
Harcourt Health
Many backfiles not yet complete.
Wiley Interscience
There were different initial lists of titles so it was hard to know what we
should be entitled to. Journals on the deal changed publisher or changed
title, so it has been hard to keep track.
There are lots of other examples of 'problem ejournals' for which we have a
database to log all queries and faults regarding problem access, missing
issues, dead links etc. This is checked weekly.
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Ian Winship
Learning Resources, University of Northumbria at Newcastle
City Campus Library, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 8ST, UK
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e-mail: [log in to unmask]
phone: 0191 227 4150 fax: 0191 227 4563
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