The end of eresourcejournal

At the end of the month, I will begin my new job at Norwich University as their Distance Learning Librarian. I am very excited about this position because I’ve wanted to work with distance learning students since the not-so-long-ago days of my own online graduate program. This is my dream job.

And so, eresourcejournal reaches its end. This blog has been more helpful to me than I expected. The process of writing about things that puzzle and frustrate me has been beneficial. First, it makes me think things through. My brain works faster than my fingers, and as I type my mind wanders to another (more appropriate) idea. Had I not taken the time to write about these topics, I may not have come to those more useful conclusions.

In addition, writing is a great memory tool. Writing online with blog software allowed me to easily retrace my steps and remind myself of past discoveries. In some cases, I was able to solve a new problem by looking back at similar situations.

Lastly, blogging connects: the advantage of writing publicly and online is that other people found me. I am grateful for the comments and emails I’ve received from everyone who visits the site or reads the RSS feed. Librarians have been a source of (wonderful) ideas, commiseration, and camaraderie. EBSCO folks have been very generous with their time, emailing me directly about the concerns and ideas I’ve covered in my posts.

Perhaps others will continue to discover these posts and find them useful. Clearly, they’ll be curious about troubleshooting electronic serials problems, as illustrated in this nifty word cloud of all the text at eresourcejournal (made at Wordle.net). I don’t know yet whether I will blog about my new job. As I re-read that sentence, I realize I likely will. I want to remain connected to my community of colleagues. I have been and will continue to follow blogs related to distance learning and distance learning librarianship. I’m sure I’ll have a few things to talk about, too.

Thank you for your visits and keeping me in your feed readers. Most of all, thank you for your comments.

(P.S. It’s a time of transition: Kelly retired one of her blogs this week. Great minds think alike!)

(P.P.S. It seems like a good idea to close the comments on all my old posts. So I’m gonna. I’ll keep this post open, and feel free to contact me in Meebo at the right.)

When an email starts a snowball

We (or maybe just I) receive messages from publishers telling us when we have new content available online. I received one last month from Atypon about three Thomas Telford titles. Generally, the announcement is just a heads-up that there are more issues online because more issues have been published.

But I noticed a few problems with this most recent message. I checked each title (and its alternate title formats, such as Proceedings of the…) at the publisher’s site (Atypon), the A-to-Z administrator, and our order records (EBSCONET).

Two titles aren’t listed on the Atypon site so I can’t check for access. I have to ask Atypon why. The third title is, but EBSCO doesn’t have a Publisher’s Site link; I asked them to add a link. Once I find out whether there will be access on Atypon, I’ll ask EBSCO to add records in the Title Wizard.

None of this is a big deal. None of this is challenging. None of this is hard to remember. It’s worth illustrating because it’s typical of how a seemingly simple notification can become a very involved process and result in a lot of work. I think that’s what most of my efforts go towards: a whole bunch of work that comes from an itty bitty notification.

That’s why the troubleshooting statistics aren’t truly indicative of the amount of work involved with problem solving and management. A troubleshooting problem that can be quickly resolved for the patron still may result in a lot more work. Snowball effect.

SpringerLINK

I received another troubleshooting report that wouldn’t have come up if the custom coverage showed up in the MARC record. In this case, instead of bringing it to EBSCO’s attention, I’m going to resolve it while tackling a larger problem.

This particular 856 (the one lacking coverage dates) is for SpringerLINK. We also have an 856 in this record for SpringerLINK (NERL), which is our consortial subscription. Because the list of titles in the SpringerLINK (NERL) package isn’t up-to-date, we added the SpringerLINK records to compensate for the missing titles.

I’m going to go through and look at all of the SpringerLINK records. If there is a second, SpringerLINK (NERL) record, I’ll remove the SpringerLINK link. The remaining SpringerLINK records will either be

• part of our non-NERL Springer subscription, or
• should be part of the NERL subscription.

It’s a somewhat daunting project, given the number of titles, but it will save me so much time in the end. I’ll have a clear picture of particular titles missing from the NERL list and I’ll avoid a few troubleshooting problems.

It’s been one year

I am going through piles and folders of emails, spreadsheets, and notes from projects past. Started with earnest and abandoned the minute something more important came along, they have gathered sneeze-inducing amounts of dust.

The desk beside me is strewn with papers which I am assembling into new piles marked “to revisit,” “to be resolved,” and “resolved”; the rest is being filed or recycled. It’s disappointing to see so many notes and printouts fill my recycling bin. Many of them make no sense to me anymore: a title on a scrap of paper with no details, or a note to email our reps at EBSCO (which I do so frequently that I don’t write it down anymore).

I have a pretty good sixth sense, and no warning bells are going off in my head as I discard half of this pile. My goal was to locate my notes on a few major (abandoned) projects, and I’ve done that. There is momentum gaining around the idea of adding e-resources to my colleagues’ workflows, and these are the projects that need to be revisited as soon as we add that capacity.

I was reviewing posts related to these projects when I saw my first one. I didn’t realize until today that February 26 marked the first anniversary of this blog. It’s a somewhat arbitrary date, and there might be more significant milestones in my work with e-resources. What is significant about these past 12 months in particular are the connections I’ve made with serialists around the country because of this site. My goals were to track my experiences and to discuss issues with other serialists. I’m fairly satisfied with the blog as a tool for storing information and communicating with colleagues. I’ll definitely consider improving the storage/searching of old posts (maybe tags?), and I look forward to making more serials connections and finding other bloggers to follow.

Defining troubleshooting

I expect to receive the 300th troubleshooting report in a month or two. Hooray. (Insert slow, sarcastic clap.) Hooray for problems.

Truthfully, I think I’ve been doing myself a disservice by counting only the problems that are reported by colleagues in ILL and Reference. My serials colleagues find lots of problems that are just as (or more) difficult and involving. I should have corrected my definition of “troubleshooting” a long time ago: then I’d probably be nearing the 600 mark.

Working definition:

Troubleshooting: any problem about electronic access that results in a data or subscription correction involving the library, publisher, vendor, or a combination thereof.

Troubleshooting: responding to questions from colleagues and patrons regarding access to electronic journals; includes any problem about electronic access that results in data or subscription correction involving the library, publisher, vendor, or a combination thereof.

[revised 2/20/08]

Re: Sharing eResource duties

There have been two responses to the message on ERIL about sharing e-resource management responsibilities. I was especially pleased to learn about the e-resources team at the University of Mississippi because:

a) they have a Head of Serials position

b) their primary troubleshooter is an e-resources librarian

c) they use Sharepoint to communicate among the six-member team

I think it would be great to have at least a serials librarian position. I like the idea of an e-resources librarian reporting to a broader serials librarian.

And speaking of an e-resources librarian, I wholeheartedly agree that the first line of defense for troubleshooting can be a librarian-level position. That kind of work can be very intricate and involved, requiring professional skills. It makes sense for the librarian to be the first line of defense and coordinate the distribution of troubleshooting reports.

I was excited to see that they communicate in Sharepoint. UVM has Sharepoint, but I don’t know if any Libraries folks are making use of it. It’s an intriguing possibility, and perhaps a band-aid until we acquire a commercial ERM.

Sharing eResource duties

I am eager to read the responses to a message posted on ERIL today. Kelly Smith at EKU asked how libraries with more than one librarian working on electronic resources are dividing the work. I spoke with colleagues about this topic yesterday, and I wondered aloud who at these libraries advertising for e-resource librarian positions is handling the remaining print subscriptions. I look forward to the replies on the list.

If you work with e-resources and do not subscribe to ERIL, I encourage you to sign up. Then search the archives for the title of the message, “Sharing eResource duties”.

Ex Libris ERM

I should have recapped the Ex Libris presentations while they were fresh in my mind, but time escaped me. I actually don’t have too much to say about Verde, because my attention was stolen by the Primo presentation. But, about Verde:

Like Innovative’s ERM, Verde operates independently from other programs. (Though it’s probably helpful that our ILS is also an Ex Libris product.) One of my colleagues asked how Verde would work with our other products. Ex Libris is open to working with any platform, and reps said it was a matter of we the customers telling the other platform that we would like them to work with Ex Libris. The rep said we could pioneer EBSCO use.

Another colleague asked about differentiating between e-journal titles for which we have a direct subscription, and those that we might get by subscribing to other titles. (We have some agreements with publishers where we subscribe to specific titles and get bonus subscriptions; we have to be sure to maintain subscriptions to those core titles.) The Ex Libris reps didn’t have a solution for that, but were interested in exploring how to best approach this situation.

The second presentation of the day was on Primo, their discovery and delivery tool. It can incorporate multiple formats into a single record and allows librarians to promote the use of, say, electronic versions over print. Libraries can include book jacket information (images and text) and patrons can add reviews and tags. Primo uses CSS, which means we can personalize the interface.

I think the part I like best is that students can log in to Primo. They can keep a record of items they’re interested in (not to mention create reviews and add/manage tags), but more importantly it automatically authenticates them for IP access if they’re off campus. People talk about integrating library resources in Facebook, where students have centralized so much of their web presence that word on the street is email and blogs are so yesterday.* So Facebook is just one login for all of a student’s web needs. Our library, if we use something like Primo, would be the academic version. Maybe WebCT is a better comparison, with its messaging abilities, but Primo (or VuFind) integration can’t be too far off. Are the majority of students using WebCT?

*Communication seems to be funneled entirely through Facebook and cell phones. I’ve started a game with myself where I presume that at least one student at a computer block (in the library or at the campus center) is on Facebook; at the campus center, they usually all are. Yesterday at a crosswalk, the two students waiting with me both flipped open their cell phones to check for or send text messages. It’s instinctual and maybe compulsive.

Wiki to share subscription information

There’s been a huge response to a recent post on the ERIL-L listserv requesting publishers’ e-journal information. A librarian at a university that is about to make the switch to online only asked if anyone has already done the work to find out if full-text matches the print version, if the publisher provides perpetual access after cancellation, and if the publisher participates in a long-term access initiative like LOCKSS or Portico.

The first person to offer to share her homemade spreadsheet of that information received about 30 responses on the list alone (I emailed her off-list) asking for a copy of the spreadsheet. Given the interest in her information, it sounds like the information that many of us have from our vendors/publishers aren’t cutting it. I suggested that

At the risk of duplicating the work that we’re paying other people for (like EBSCO’s Access and Authentication information), is this something that this community should share and edit, perhaps in wiki form?

The idea was well received, and the people who run the ER&L website have offered to host the wiki; I think it’s a good idea to have it on a non-institutional website. When it’s ready, the URL for the wiki will be posted at http://electroniclibrarian.org/forum.

Update 9/6/2007: In the meantime, here’s the Eastern Kentucky University spreadsheet.

Update 9/10/2007: The Electronic Libraries wiki now includes the Publishers’ Perpetual Access Information spreadsheet. See Bonnie’s post for more information and the URL.

Organizing correspondence

I’ve been living in my email for much of the last two weeks in an effort to follow up on a bunch of emails that I haven’t had time to give my full attention. I organize my e-resource-related emails into four folders in Thunderbird.

-I filter messages from our internal listserv into its own folder
-the guts of troubleshooting go in an “E-troubleshooting” folder
-general maintenance issues are kept in an “E-maintenance” folder
-registration correspondence is stored in an “EBSCO project” folder

That last one is the biggest folder, with 793 messages. (I’m only using 11.47% of 50 MB inbox quota. Whew!) It’s the oldest folder, as well as the folder that hasn’t had any action in quite a long time.

I’ve mentioned before that I thread the messages to better keep them organized. I tend to start off by changing the subject line of the initial message to the title of the resource. (If we ever use a web form like Dana Medical Library, I’d like the subject line to be generated by the text in a “name of resource you can’t access” field.) In order to keep a string from splitting too much I create new, related messages by replying to the old ones and removing the body, recipients, and adjust the subject line; that way, they still stay in the thread. And I try to sort the messages as quickly as I receive them, so that if the reply’s subject line changes (like when a company adds a ticket number) it will at least appear near the other messages. Thunderbird isn’t perfect. Neither am I, which is why I have nearly a year’s worth of “problem fixed!” messages to sort out of my inbox. That’s my go-ahead to delete any duplicate emails so that I can retain a nearly complete account of the correspondence in the fewest number of messages possible.

I’m pleased with my system, except that there are so many different problems with different titles that I can’t always recognize a problem by its title. I might have to search all three of my “E-…” folders to find the thread.

My goals for this year (a la self appraisal) focus on providing quality service for troubleshooting, and that starts with behind-the-scenes organization of notes and keeping an archive. In that respect, I’ve started to think that maybe I should put all of my correspondence in one “E-…” folder. Would it be helpful or a bother to have the registration correspondence about Journal X mixed with notes about correcting a broken link alongside a patron complaint that the TOC links to the wrong article? I imagine an ERM would combine the whole history, but I think the categories I have provide a helpful distinction and less clutter. Hence, I’m reluctant to combine the folders.

Though maybe I could color-code the categories of messages with labels before I combine folders…