emily,

i would like very much to respond to your survey. however, the whole
terminology of e-journal material is overwhelming. i have been a serials
librarian for the last 15 years and i am having difficulty organizing, and
managing this type of material.

here are some of my questions.

1.  how many e-journals. is the number inclusive of those journals that
have a paid paper subscription, but are also available electronically;
those journals available through a type of services such as proquest, and
j-store.

2. the question of aggregators is problematic. when you ask about
aggregators do you mean subscription agents, (such as ebsco)  who notify
you about no charge electronic availability along with your print
subscription, or do you mean a service such as ebscohost. or do you mean
services such as proquest and j-stor.. or do you mean services such as
catchword. the reason i am being specific and difficult about this
question is because some are easier than others to register.

i will answer your survey. i think it is very important, and your paper
when presented and published will have an important impact on the way we
do business. i am positive that serials librarians will benefit from your
research.

anecdotally, i will say that registering was a difficult and extremely
time consuming process. what we did here was go through a list of titles
that ebsco sent us,(at the beginning of the fall semester it was about 360
titles, but has grown) that we had paper subscriptions for and were
available free of charge electronically.

some of these we were able to register for using catchword, some we were
able to register directly by the publisher. in this case some publishers
had several titles and we could do one registration for many titles. that
was good.

but in many cases we had to register titles directly to the publisher on
an individual basis. that was the most time consuming activity for several
reasons: in several instances, in an attempt to register directly to
society publications, that i subscribed to through ebsco i needed to call
the society for my account number. when i called the different society i
kept getting the same office.

getting some commercial publications in same cases were just as difficult.

in many cases their technology was not at the point of availability as it
should have been.

now there is another question. we keep getting notices from different
publishers that electronic access is available through our print
subscriptions. we hesitate to register on such a basis. ebsco has told us
they will be sending out updates as to which journals will be coming
electronically. this way we can do the process on a batch basis. not piece
by piece. however, ebsco has not done this yet. we are setting aside all
the notices to see if when they do send the list if it is inclusive.

another side to this whole thing is. how are libraries organizing the
material. once registration is complete how are you filing the
information. at the moment we are marking the kardex and annotating it
with the information whether it is direct, aggregator, or anything else.
then we file the paper in a file cabinet.

thanks for listening.

linda meiseles

seials librarian
hofstra university.
hempstead, ny. 11550

516-463-5959
<LIBSRLZM@MAIL1.HOFSTRA.EDU>

>>> emcelro@WPO.IT.LUC.EDU 03/12/01 09:22AM >>>
Hello,

I apologize for the cross-listing of this email since it is being sent to
two other email listservs.  A few weeks ago, I sent a survey on e-journal
management to three listservs asking for people's perspectives on problems
they have encountered in managing e-journals.  Based on some of the
responses I received, I have placed a survey on the following website:

http://www.formsite.com/ABCD/journalmanagement/

In the new survey, I have tried to ask questions that will provide more
data for analysis.  Many questions came out of the answers I received and
it has been expanded to include information that I had ignored in my
initial survey.  I hope to receive enough data that will help all of us in
understanding some of the shared problems we experience in managing
e-journals.  Also, after sending out my first survey I received a lot of
comments from different vendors and publishers.  I hope that the
information I gather will help them resolve conflicts with their services.

I hope to use some of the information as background information in a talk
I am giving at the end of March on managing e-journals.

I will leave the survey open until March 21st.  I'll provide a survey to
the listserv later that week.

Thank you for all of your help!

Emily McElroy

Emily McElroy
Serials & Electronic Collections Librarian
Loyola Health Sciences Library
2160 S. First Ave.
Maywood, IL 60153
708-216-5302
<emcelro@WPO.IT.LUC.EDU>