Difficulties emailing articles from EBSCO periodicals indexes (Nancy Henwood) Marcia Tuttle 06 May 1999 21:48 UTC
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 6 May 1999 14:44:33 -0800 From: HENWOOD@CAMOSUN.BC.CA Subject: Difficulties emailing articles from EBSCO periodicals indexes Subject: Ongoing Email Difficulties in EBSCO periodical indexes Libraries providing EBSCO periodical indexes should warn their patrons to check for receipt of emailed articles and keep records in order to re-request missing articles, or use some other way to obtain those articles if it is important to receive each one. Since November 1998, the reference staff at Camosun College has had complaints from students that fulltext articles emailed from our EBSCO periodical index, Academic Fulltext Elite, did not always arrive. Complaints to EBSCO, from us or from our provincial library consortium, Electronic Library Network of British Columbia, were answered with the suggestion that this might be a problem with local Camosun College servers or our college's connections to EBSCO. Despite EBSCO adjustments to our profile, I did not receive about 9 to 15%, or more, of the emails that I sent to myself from EBSCO. In March, I paired myself with another reference librarian in a different college in a different city, to see if the problem was only a Camosun College problem. We emailed each other fulltext articles and lists of citations as well as emailing them to ourselves. Out of 74 articles or citations emailed, 22 did not arrive! Often emails that were sent from the same EBSCO session, from the same college to the same other location resulted in one email being promptly received and the other email never arriving. Emails of citations did not come about 3 times as often as fulltext articles, or perhaps it was that the citations were usually sent second, after emailing a fulltext article and that the second item from the same session was less likely to work. However, the 2 emails were not always from the same sessions, depending on how busy the reference desks were. Recently, EBSCO did inform me and ELN, after I described my experiences to their technical services department, that EBSCO knew that it was unreliable for emails regardless of time, location, etc. We were told EBSCO had located the problem and had fixed it. The problem was that 2 out of 9 of their EBSCO servers had been unreliable in this random way. However, it is unclear to me that the problem is completely fixed. I began again sending myself 2 emails most mornings, and, so far, out of 6 emails, only 5 have been received. The EBSCOhost Academic Elite Fulltext database is an excellent source of very worthwhile academic and popular articles for our college students, both diploma and university transfer students, in art, criminology, sociology, psychology and general courses, but it is very inconvenient and frustrating when the students do not receive emailed articles. Most of them are not at such an advanced level that they would keep records of which articles they would have requested, and so their research, and thereby their marks, can suffer when they do not receive every article requested. Nancy Henwood Camosun Library Term Librarian henwood@camosun.bc.ca