On 5/31/2002, I sent a message to four Internet mailing lists (BUSLIB, ARL-EJOURNAL, DIGLIB, and SERIALST) asking for comments on subscription vendors, specifically EBSCO, divine.com, and SwetsBlackwell. I received responses from 10 librarians, from a nice mix of academic, public, and corporate. Their aggregated responses follow, with all identifying info stripped. **Many thanks to those of you that responded -- your comments are proving very valuable to us!** We are reviewing our options for a subscription vendor, looking specifically at divine.com, SwetsBlackwell, and EBSCO (Corporate Service Center). I see some posts in list archives, but wonder if any of you can provide advice, raves, rants, etc. on the following specific points: 1. Quality of customer service -- do you think this is more dependent on the company or on the individual assigned to your account? q It is a mixture of both. If the company is good & provides good support, then the sales representatives should also be good. I've noticed that there are sometimes regional differences. Most of the companies work hard to maintain a consistent level of quality among the headquarters & the regional offices, but this can be hard to do. q Absolutely. We'll even pay exorbitant service fees just to have someone reliable and dependable on the other end of the line. q Our rep. at Ebsco is great, she usually can fix everything, except some things happen slower than I would like. The individual makes the difference. q We heard from some people was that EBSCO service did seem to vary somewhat depending upon the region/sales account--but that things had improved considerable. q divine/Faxon is an excellent vendor--we have always received outstanding service from them. q For microform subscriptions, we find Proquest to be excellent. q Run from EBSCO as fast as possible. The "service" I received from E out of the Cary IL office stunk. Problems always needed to be solved by someone else, it wasn't anything they could help with. q We use Swets and Harrassowitz. I'm very pleased with the service I receive. I have my very own account reps, direct toll free phone # and emails. If they make an error they admit it and correct it. If the publisher is doing its all-too-frequent stunts, they stay on them until the problem is corrected. q Our institution has experience with both Swets Blackwell (corporate office in NY) and EBSCO Corporate Service Center. I'm not sure I would give a ringing endorsement for either one q SwetsBlackwell's service has been uneven--great at times, lousy at others. We started with a really stellar account manager (a deciding factor in awarding the contract--we had worked with him before), but he left to work for another company as their "private rep". His assistant was promoted to account manager and did OK for a while, but suddenly she was gone "for health reasons" and they didn't even notify us until her voicemail and email filled up and we started calling supervisors. The rep we have now has been more or less effective, usually depending on how good an assistant he has. I sometimes get complaints from the divisions that they have been ignored until I intervened on their behalf. Service has been in a decline for almost a year, starting last summer when the NY office migrated from their old computer system to SwetsBlackwell's new one. I can tell they are trying hard, and are still traumatized (the WTC fell on top of their old building) but it's becoming increasingly difficult to justify using them. q EBSCO experience: three years ago our purchasing department asked us to "shop around" again, so we tried EBSCO Corporate Service Center for a portion of the Library's renewal list?we approached this test with trepidation because we had had bad service from EBSCO (not CSC) when we used them in the '80's and early '90's. EBSCO assured us that the CSC would be much better, the test started out well, and we seemed to have a competent rep. Suddenly he was gone (no notice) and was replaced by a real rookie. We decided that, since EBSCO was comparable to SwetsBlackwell in terms of price, service and their online interface, there was no compelling reason to migrate everyone to EBSCO. When we notified them that we would be transferring our test subscriptions back to SwetsBlackwell, service simply stopped, even on subscriptions that had months to run. SwetsBlackwell is still trying to resolve some of the service problems caused by EBSCO's bungling. q We haven't had significant problems with SwetsBlackwell, but I'd rate both divine/Faxon and Harrassowitz more highly. Customer service: excellent for both. Years ago we had serious problems with divine/Faxon's service. The problems are all gone now; I don't know whether the improvement is because of our customer service rep (who is spectacular) or constant throughout the company. I know that Harrassowitz's quality is company-wide. From both companies, we get visits from sales reps, maybe 2-4 times per year; this helps but isn't essential. q I think that SB had a lot of problems with our orders post-merger. q I wish that Ebsco would make sure that our payments actually get to the publisher on time. This year we have had over 10 publications that never received the checks from Ebsco, thus delaying our starting dates. There should be some type of check/balance. I also wish we would stop receiving so many duplicates of magazines, it wastes my time and our T.S. staff's time. q Harrassowitz is justifiably known for excellent customer service, and I understand that they are trying to beef up their US subscription base q We are generally happy with EBSCO for US subs?our customer reps have been responsive and helpful to inquiries/problems. q Our experience with divine.com's predecessor: when we left EBSCO in 1992, we switched to Turner Subscriptions. Turner was absolutely great until they were bought out by Dawson (who also bought Faxon) in 1995 or so. After that it was all downhill (or maybe more like falling off a cliff): they couldn't produce a simple holdings list, billed us for hundreds of subscriptions we hadn't renewed and couldn't figure out how to credit for them, and were unconcerned about service problems, even at management level . When somebody pressed the wrong key and changed the ship-to address on 500 subscriptions to one hapless person in our photographic division, that was the final straw. I tried to follow Faxon/Turner's progress when Rowe.com bought them, but didn't see much posted about them on SERIALST. We were thinking about giving them a test when we heard that divine.com had bought them. We know nothing at all about divine's reputation, except that they now have purchased Northern Light, too. 2. On-site customer service rep ? do you have an on-site customer rep? Do you prefer this arrangement? Do you recommend it? q It works okay regardless of the location of the rep, as long as they are responsive to our questions. Locally based people may have more of a vested interest in making things work for you. q Absolutely not. This is just one more person who doesn't really know what is going on in the trenches that wants to take up your time, your staff time, and probably want to meet with your boss, too. q I have had one rep out since I started 4 years ago, and she really did not tell me anything I did not already know. The same things that Faxon told me at a former job. "Neodata hires students who don't really understand that these are renewals, so they always enter new subscriptions, and sometimes they start them early because they just don't know better." 3. Global service -- is customer service consistent globally? Are your affiliates well- and expediently served? <no responses to this question -- most responders were from US-only organizations> 4. Integration (or lack thereof) with book vendors ? do you buy books through your subscription vendor? If so, how's the performance? q EBSCO's just started the book part of its business & they appear to have mostly public library type of material. q We have separate contracts with book vendors. I would not recommend using a serial vendor as a book jobber. Even within the family of serial vendors, there are some who do better with domestic subs, some who do better with foreign subs, and some who do better with standing orders. q We did not ask SwetsBlackwell to purchase books as part of the contract, though at the time they said informally that they could do it. Some of the divisions receive their standing orders for annuals through SwetsBlackwell, with mixed success. I understand that firm orders for books have been very unsuccessful. q I don't think divine/Faxon handles books. Harrassowitz does, and our Acquisitions Dept. uses them for European titles. q We haven't found that our journal vendors could handle books--except for Harrassowitz. We haven't used EBSCO enough to say, but certainly divine and SwetsBlackwell have no abilities in that area. q Harrassowitz does book orders. 5. Negotiating/managing e content purchase and access -- does your vendor negotiate deals for e-journals? q If requested, EBSCO does. They have a good background in electronic resources & offer package deals. q I'm hesitant to involve one more person in the already-complex and ever-changing electronic resource workflow. I have had one bad experience with a serials vendor handling the billing for a database subscription: we ended up paying double for a few months because of miscommunication, lack of performance, and a general unfamiliarity with the product. q Both divine/Faxon and Harrassowitz have done limited negotiation and ordering of e-journal for us. Mostly we have done that independently. The vendors, especially divine/Faxon, offer services in this area well beyond anything we have taken advantage of. do they negotiate well on your behalf? q We have not had to use this & all the vendors we talked to about this said they'd do it if asked, but that few libraries ask them for this kind of help. do they coordinate access for your users? q At this point, EBSCO is not providing e-journal access to us. do they provide reliable usage statistics to you? <no responses> 6. who has the best user interface? q The serials problem solvers always go to dataSwets first. q Faxon's kLibrary is wonderful; Harrassowitz's system is adequate. q My preference would be EBSCO and divine, although SwetsBlackwell is okay. q The Harrassowitz user interface 'OTTOSerials' is just okay, but it is being revised and enhanced as I write this. q EBSCO has a very good user interface. 7. What do you wish they would do for you that they do not currently do? q A little more informative on some of the things that need to be done for electronic invoicing and definitely more informative on some of the pricing issues we've faced with some specific titles. That last isn't entirely their fault... part of it was due to the transition between vendors & our discovery of some things that the former company was not doing. q Nothing much; we've learned not to have too high of an expectation of any vendor. 8. have you done a formal evaluation (RFP?) of the three that you would be willing to share? <2 people shared their RFPs> Advice/Other comments: q on divine: look at the financial reports on this company very carefully. It will either survive and make billions for everyone, or it will collapse within a few years. It's a public company, so reports are available on the current status from SEC and various Internet cites. q on SwetsBlackwell: does their billing cycle, and their practice of billing only when they have final firm prices, meet the financial cycle of your organization? q One thing I can tell you is to make sure you get them in for demos. We used a weighting tool to evaluate each vendor based on their RFPs. That's how we decided who we brought in for presentations. We then used the tool again after the demos. What was shocking to all of us was that the vendor that came out last initially, came out first after the demos! So you can't always tell just by looking at responses to questions on paper. Laura Zick, Information Scientist Library & Information Services Eli Lilly and Company Lilly Corporate Center, DC 0737, Indianapolis, Indiana 46285 USA zick_laura@lilly.com; voice: 317.277.1236; fax: 317.276.4418
