Dear all,

Whilst we have always encouraged and welcomed feedback about Ingenta's
services, it is a shock to read the comments posted to this list in recent
days. Of course, no one wants to get a bad (not to mention public) review --
but we also don't want to deliver bad services, and we have worked
enormously hard with the library community over the past few years to make
the necessary changes and improvements to our service. We feel that the
comments made on the list, or privately to Wendy Belcher, are not
representative of today's Ingenta, and so we wanted to address them before
this potentially slanderous discussion gets out of hand -- for example:

"Ingenta turns off access for no reason". Of course we don't. Providing your
access is our core business, and it is important to us not to screw that up.
Comments on this subject likely result from last year, when we had some
problems with publishers who (despite our requests) did not provide us with
their renewal data prior to the end of our agreed gracing period. We
honoured our gracing agreement with publishers but it caused many problems
for libraries. This year, we have informed publishers that we will refuse to
cut off graced access until they have correctly supplied their renewals, and
we're part way through a very thorough plan to ensure last year's mistakes
are not repeated.

"extremely unresponsive and unhelpful; Unanswered phone calls, unanswered
email, when I do get an answer it is some variation of "we can't" for
whatever reason." The original poster made this comment about Extenza, now
part of Atypon, not Ingenta. Ingenta's policy is to respond to emails to
help@ingentaconnect.com within 12-24 hours. Again, we had problems with this
during the height of the renewals problems last year. Since then, we have
taken on more staff to make real improvements to our communications, and we
are generally much quicker at responding to and resolving your problems.

"I don't want to have to reregister every time I renew" Of course not, and
we don't expect you to. Per the above explanation, renewals should happen
without your intervention, but we had some problems last year -- which we
have now implemented new procedures to avoid in future.

Ultimately, we fully accept that we have not always delivered good service
in the past, but with your input we thought we'd turned things around -- of
1600 respondees in our Nov 2005 library survey:
*73% rated Ingenta "reliable" or "extremely reliable"
*82% were happy with our customer service response & turnaround times

If that's not your experience, please *tell us* what else we should be doing
to improve. Ingenta has changed; let us prove that to you.

Regards,
Amel
_________________________________________________________
Amel Abourachid
Library and End User Services Manager
Ingenta PLC
Unit 1 Riverside Court, Bath, BA2 3DZ, UK
T  +44 1225 361113
F  +44 1225 361155
E  amel.abourachid@ingenta.com
www.ingentaconnect.com
Ingenta: Technology + Services for the Publishing and Information
Industries.

-----Original Message-----
From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum
[mailto:SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU]On Behalf Of Belcher, Wendy
Sent: 2 March 2006 4:30 am
To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
Subject: [SERIALST] Best Journal Hosting Sites Follow up

I wanted to thank everyone so much for writing to me with your advice
and thoughts re journal hosting! I thought you might be interested to
hear what librarians had to say.

First, librarians are extremely peeved with Ingenta. I don't think a
single person wrote to me without warning in CAPS not to go with them.
So, thank you, I definitely am not going to be going with them (or
buying their stock any time soon). (see below for more comments)

Second, lots of people liked JSTOR and MUSE and everybody insisted that
just because old content was up on JSTOR or MUSE that they wouldn't
cancel the subscription. I guess I should believe, but it's tough to
take that leap of faith. If you might cancel, confess now!

Third, people generally agreed that EBSCO and Highwire were the best
bets.

**************
Regarding Ingenta
Cons:
hard to reach.
increasingly frustrating.
turn off access for no apparent reason.
slow in processing renewal information.
avoid Ingenta, have a long history of being uncooperative with both
libraries and publishers; cut off our access to dozens of titles in
mid-March, said we were at fault, we confirmed our renewals with Ingenta
the previous December.
extremely unresponsive and unhelpful; Unanswered phone calls, unanswered
email, when I do get an answer it is some variation of "we can't" for
whatever reason.
avoid Ingenta; they just close holdings and don't tell us; this happens
with print-includes-electronic access subscriptions from small presses
or associations; I don't want to have to reregister every time I renew.
new problems arise all the time and never get resolved, terms and
conditions are impossible to determine, trying to activate new titles is
a shot in the dark, multiple accounts are established and get mixed up
as new titles are added and so on.
very slow; slow to get back with you when you have a problem.
very bad since it is so hard to register and the access seems to come
and go without warning or logic.
Pros:
Their website is pretty easy to use though.
Ingenta gets you a  hosting service combined with a destination site,
which might boost traffic.
Ingenta's prices are very competitive

**************
Regarding HighWire
Cons:
True that it's a little tricky to use for some things.
Excellent but not the cheapest option.
a destination and traffic point but more if you are in the biomed area
encourages publishers to make back file content freely available.

Pros:
gives you a lot of information about the journals which is very useful.
very responsive.
very good.
we don't find it difficult at all and we already have lots of e-journals
there.
by far the easiest to search, print, and browse from the patron's
perspective;  I rarely have to walk users through finding articles when
they are on a Highwire journal;  That is not always the case with
Ingenta and aggregators.
If your terms are "single-site free-with-print", I would definitely
contact Highwire;  They've been around a long time, so they probably
know their stuff, and now is probably a good time to get assistance from
them, because they're not adding journals left and right anymore;  They
have design templates and license "boilerplate" language that you can
use as-is or adapt as desired; They've been working with people just
like you, so even if their system seems confusing, I'd bet they can make
it easy for you; From my point of view as a librarian, I know what to
expect from Highwire and how it works;  I know what to do when something
goes wrong and feel confident I can straighten it out;  From the
librarian perspective they are very easy to maintain (IP addresses) and
deal with

**************
Regarding We Don't Cancel if the Free Old Content Is on Line
--We don't cancel any subscriptions if the content is also available in
JSTOR due to the fact JSTOR does not contain current content.
We do cancel subscriptions if the content is in Project Muse, but that
is because we don't want to pay twice for the same content. We look at
Project Muse as a Big Deal sort of package.
--Also, because they host humanities titles we haven't cancelled our
print subscriptions We've used the online versions as a supplement, but
the humanities are one area where most of our patrons insist we keep
print subscriptions
--My library doesn't cancel print subscriptions because of JSTOR
coverage, but we do cancel microfilm subscriptions because we rely on
JSTOR for the back-file. On the other hand, we do often cancel print
subscriptions if we have Project Muse coverage, as long as we also have
a back-file, either in microfilm or in JSTOR.
I--'d vote for Project MUSE and JSTOR if possible.  We have not
cancelled our subscriptions just because they are included in one or
both of these.  PM is strong in the humanities and social sciences, so
this would be a good fit.  I'm sorry that libraries have chosen to
cancel, but it may be due to tight budgets, unfortunately.
--Project Muse has current content so some libraries may cancel
subscriptions outside of Muse, although publisher will still be getting
revenue from having journals in a Muse package. On the other hand, JStor
contains older content only; I doubt any library will be cancelling a
current subscription because that journal is covered by JStor, unless
they really didn't want the title anyway, regardless of format or
coverage.