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Besides the difficulty of managing ejournals and ebooks compared to print versions. Why is eresource management, keeping a accurate knowledge base etc is so hard?

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Your question seems to negate itself... "Besides the difficulty of managing ejournals...why is eresource management so hard?" Are you looking for information on specific difficulties people have run into in managing eresources? – Mary Jo Finch Jun 3 '12 at 17:28
I don't know if it's a 'difficulty' so much as a 'problem' -- if you have to cut back funding, you tend to lose access to all of the back catalog, not just you stop getting new issues. I've been recommending that MPOW move the paper journals to storage, so we would have them for negotiating contracts with the publishers. – Joe Jun 5 '12 at 23:27

3 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

Assuming one doesn't have a vendor ERM product, one must maintain or handle:

  1. A-Z lists
  2. Holdings in the OPAC (and whole records for newly-acquired journals)
  3. Link resolver knowledgebase (which I'm told is tricky to troubleshoot)
  4. Proxy server (with all the IP address fiddling that entails)
  5. Usage stats (even when they say they're COUNTER compliant, they're often not... and not all of them even try for compliance)
  6. Invoicing, bills, etc.
  7. Troubleshooting, when something in the above rickety stack goes wrong. As it does.

That's a lot. And I probably missed some things!

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8. Data format. 9. Device support. – Joe Atzberger Jun 6 '12 at 20:03
Could you elaborate? I'm not sure what you mean by "data format." Does "device support" mean mobile, ereader, both? – dsalo Jun 6 '12 at 20:09
Electronic content is delivered in a given format, like PDF, ePub, TIFF, MP3, AAC, etc. JSTOR, for example, links you out to install Acrobat Reader, Flash, Windows Media Player AND Apple QuickTime if you want to be able to access ALL indexed content. That's a serious compatibility burden. While reasonable given the extent of content, it prevents certain devices from access... to certain content (e.g. iPad won't run flash). Because of this, the YOU end up being tech support for the patron who thinks it should work a new device. Or when security settings prevent QT from installing. Etc. – Joe Atzberger Jun 6 '12 at 21:23
I am a bit confused about the difference between ERM and a link resolver knowledgabase. Eg. III ERM is the knowledgebase for webbridge, so wouldn't owning a link resolver knowledgabase automatically mean you have a erm? Or is erm here to mean the ability to add licenses etc etc?? Similarly I am of the impression A-Z lists are populated from erm/knowledgebase. eg serialssolutions 360core feeds straight to their EJ portal. Basically i am confused abt diff between erm and knowledgebase. – aarontay Jun 7 '12 at 16:35
I'll suggest that that's worth a separate question, Aaron. – dsalo Jun 7 '12 at 16:44
up vote 5 down vote

The main thing I find, aside from dsalo's list, is that you are working with virtual items rather than physical, which means your workflow must change to include more documentation of where you are in the process.

If you subscribe to a print journal and it doesn't arrive when you expect it to, your ILS usually notifies you that it's late, and then you can do something about it. Not so with an ejournal. Usually it's your ILL or public services departments that notify you when you don't have access, unless you dedicate staff to checking every title on a regular basis.

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up vote 4 down vote

One other thing that is different than handling physical items is that the various packages and aggregators present a moving target of titles and coverages. This is a part of daslo's #3 above.

If you receive and checkin a journal issue, it stays on the shelf (or checked out) until you bind it or weed it. If you add holdings for "The Journal of Irreproducible Results" from a package or aggregator, then next year the package changes, that journal disappears.

This is why large or serials-intensive libraries often use a third party service to track these changes and populate their knowledgebases and/or catalog holdings. Examples are Serials Solutions, Ex Libris SFX Knowledge Base, Worldcat knowledge base. These services allow librarians to say "We have package X" and lets the service keep track of what's actually in that package.

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