-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Paraprofessional staff and ejournals
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2003 08:37:31 +1000
From: Jean Dartnall <Jean.Dartnall@jcu.edu.au>

We are a smallish regional University library and have about 9000
ejournal titles including Proquest and Gale aggregations.  We only count
full text titles and we put 'mini MARC records' in our catalogues for
the aggregator sets.  See our catalogue at
http://www.library.jcu.edu.au/Tropicat/tropicat.shtml or our ejournal
list (which is harvested from the catalogue) at
http://www.library.jcu.edu.au/Resources/journals.shtml

The work that I give my paraprofessionals is to progress through the
ejournals list checking for changes in e.g. URL, coverage, title, late
issues (it's amazing how often publishers fail to post and are pleased
when we remind them or at least pretend to be!), discrepancies between
the stated information about embargoes, full text availability and
reality, etc..  If there are changes needed to the catalogue holdings
they email me a copy of the relevant Web page and I make the catalogue
change.  Because of the relatively slow Internet links we suffer from,
we do this work first thing in the morning, usually for about an hour,
until the net gets irritatingly slow i.e. we do about 5 hours/week of
this.  This means that we get through the alphabet about 4 times a
year.  I know that we could use automated link checkers but this would
not pick up any of the other changes and problems which are identified
at the rate of about one or two a day.

I hope this is useful information for you.

Jean

--
Jean Dartnall
Serials Librarian

Jean.Dartnall@jcu.edu.au

(07) 4781 4492 (tel)
(07) 4781 5886 (fax)

James Cook University
Townsville
Queensland 4811