I thought I would reply on-list, as I think you are referring to a common issue: bad data in link resolvers.

Where does the bad data come from? One prime source is bad vendor data. That is, error-prone title/holding lists provided by vendors. The staff updating link resolver KBs don’t have time to check 10,000 titles in a list from XYZ aggregator.

Possible issues include, in no particular order:

· bad URLs

· inconsistent title listings (initial articles, capitalization, ampersands, etc.)

· inconsistent treatment of non-standard characters

· inconsistent treatment of non-English titles (or whatever language is standard to the journal platform/database)

· incorrect holdings information

· not listing the ISSN

· incorrectly listing titles as full text, when the full text has been yanked

· omitting titles that do have full text

There may be also time lags where something changes, but it’s not reflected in the vendor’s official holdings list until weeks or months later. Then the link resolver staff have to upload it and perhaps they are not notified when the vendor list is updated, or it takes awhile to clean up the list for import, or what have you.

We have used the Millennium ERM to import data from link resolvers to create brief bibs and checkins, which means our ejournals are in our catalog. The ERM Coverage Load process has made me acutely aware of how “unclean data” can really make life difficult for people downstream. (as when I have had to clean up dozens of journal records from a certain aggregator, because of inconsistent capitalization and title listing on the part of that aggregator).

Anyway it’s at least partly a quality control issue with vendors, but how much we can influence them is another question.

Diane Westerfield, Electronic Resources & Serials Librarian

Tutt Library, Colorado College

diane.westerfield@coloradocollege.edu

(719) 389-6661

(719) 389-6082 (fax)

From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum [mailto:SERIALST@list.uvm.edu] On Behalf Of Schaffer, Marysue
Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2011 12:21 PM
To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
Subject: [SERIALST] titles dropped from Serials Solutions

We have been using Serials Solutions for our electronic journals and books for about a year now. Recently a significant number of subscribed titles have been dropped without warning from our Serials Solutions databases and we are trying to trace the true source of the problem. We suspect that the publishers are not providing complete information to Serials Solutions, and when Serials Solutions updates those packages these titles are simply removed from their site. We have no way to discover the loss until our patrons voice their complaints. Specifically, in the past two days this issue has occurred with Informa Healthcare (31 titles, all preceding current journal titles but where we have continued access to the former title) and with MD Consult Expanded Clinics Series (where 39 titles, active and inactive, just disappeared from the original 65 tracked titles). This is a very serious situation and defeats the purpose of relying on Serials Solutions for our electronic resource functions.

Surely we are not the only library experiencing these difficulties. If anyone else has noticed similar problems, would you please contact me off-list?

Thanks,

Marysue

Marysue J. Schaffer

Associate Director, Collection Management

Bernard Becker Medical Library

Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine

660 S. Euclid Ave., St. Louis MO 63110

(314) 362-0997

fax (314) 454-6606

schaffem@wusm.wustl.edu

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