Re: Summary: Survey on e-journal services Gaele Gillespie 07 Mar 2001 15:27 UTC
Questions for Emily McElroy re respondents to her e-journal services survey: Emily, given your approximately 50 respondents, could you give us a breakdown as to approx. how many were from large academic libraries, how many from small academic libraries, how many from special libraries, how many from public libraries? Was there any information provided as to how many e-journal subscriptions on average each respondent's library currently has? If you can provide such additional information from the responses you received, it would be an aid to putting the other parts of your summary of responses into perspective and in giving a bit more context for those responses. If you can't, that's OK; just thought it would be worth asking. Thanks. -- Gaele Gillespie / Serials Librarian / University of Kansas Libraries <ggillespie@UKANS.EDU> -----Original Message----- From: Emily McElroy [mailto:emcelro@WPO.IT.LUC.EDU] Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2001 2:17 PM To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU Subject: Summary: Survey on e-journal services I apologize for not posting this sooner but results were still coming in as of last week. Overall comments: Most people who responded (around 50 people) go directly to the publisher's site or use Ingenta and Catchword over using a vendor's aggregator product. Most of the people who do use a vendor's product use EBSCO Online and then SwetsNet. People seem very impressed with the service of Catchword and Ingenta. Most of the respondents felt that going direct or using another service was more useful than going through their vendor. Many people said that they order their titles through more than one vendor, so it is nice not to be tied too much to one vendor's product. Other people found that they were spending so much time trying to resolve problems with their vendor that it was easier to just go through Ingenta or Catchword because of their easy set-up process and excellent customer service. (I do have a question - do you think free services like Ingenta or Catchword will move to a pay for access service?) 1. How much time do you spend on maintenance? Most people spend a lot of time maintaining their e-journal collections. Initial activation was hands down the most time consuming part of ejournal administration. As one person said, activation is not as simple as the vendor or publisher makes it seem. Some libraries don't track ejournal holdings because of the time involved. My favorite response was "entirely too much" since that is how I feel most days. 2. Are you spending a lot of time troubleshooting problems? The overall answer was yes. It seemed to be more of an issue with people who go through a vendor's product. The number one issue regardless of using an aggregator or going direct was losing access at the beginning of the calendar year. Some of the issues mentioned were problems with redirect URLs, Adobe Acrobat is incompatible with a provider, and server down-time. No orders recorded, passwords that don't work, titles coming and going, lack of communication, and delayed payments were some other answers. 3. Responsiveness of the vendor in setting up or handling problems with the services It was mixed. It seemed to vary with the type of service people used. People found the vendors to have a poor response time, especially in the set-up process. Others found that customer service at Ingenta or Catchword was stellar. At least two people stated that the vendor had not tried the system before they offered it. 4. Are you notified of changes to the system? Catchword and Ingenta - yes. Vendors - mixed. 5. Is the information up-to-date? Most people said that things were usually current. 6. Strengths and Weaknesses (this applied only to vendor's services) Strengths - table of contents are updated, index a lot of the journals they are interested in, value of service for little or not cost, common interface Weaknesses - lack of response, "work too hard to fix things they should have caught before they offered service" 7. Would this type of service sway your decision in picking a vendor - yes and no. Since most people go direct or deal with services such as Ingenta or Catchword it wouldn't make as much of a difference. However if they used a vendor's product it would make a difference in selecting a vendor. Please don't hesitate in contacting me if you have any questions about the survey and its results. Emily McElroy Emily McElroy Serials & Electronic Collections Librarian Loyola Health Sciences Library 2160 S. First Ave. Maywood, IL 60153 708-216-5302 <emcelro@WPO.IT.LUC.EDU>