We have canceled our Gale Virtual Reference Library subscription to the International Directory of Company Histories mostly due to low usage. However, the access issue noted here was another major drawback. And, we also struggled with the vendor on billing issues.  I am reluctant to look at any other GVRL series until some of this gets resolved.
 
 
 
Judith M. Nagata
Serials/Electronic Resources Librarian
Harrisburg Area Community College
Library Central Services
One HACC Dr.
Harrisburg, PA 17110
 
Ph: 717-221-1300, x 1624
 


>>> "Pennington, Buddy D." <penningtonb@UMKC.EDU> 12/12/2011 6:29 PM >>>

Hi all,

 

I am wondering if anyone has gotten any reasonable answers from Gale as to why they cannot provide title-level URLs for their online series. For example, we have Business Plans Handbook volumes 1-17. And we have 17 separate URLs for this title.

 

Currently, we are using one bibliographic record with a separate 856 field for each volume. This does not scale forward, as you can imagine. We could use Serials Solutions, but they also treat each volume as a separate book record. So we would end up with 17 separate bib records in this case. This is also a problem unless a library decides to limit access to just the current few volumes.

 

Or I suppose we could link to just the GVRL interface. What are other libraries doing?

 

Seems like treating these as serials would be much easier in terms of user access. Has anyone heard whether Gale is planning on doing anything about this?

 

Buddy Pennington

Director of Collections and Access Management

University of Missouri - Kansas City

304 Miller Nichols Library

800 East 51st Street

Kansas City, MO  64110

816-235-1548

816-333-5584 (fax)

 

UMKC Libraries: Discovery. Knowledge. Empowerment.