QUESTIONNAIRE ON ELECTRONIC JOURNALS (E-JOURNALS)

Dear Colleague:

The Periodical Oversight Committee (POC) at the San Francisco Public
Library has been meeting to determine the best procedures for handling
electronic journals (e-journals).

Individual e-journal subscriptions (as opposed to e-journals in
aggregate databases) present unique challenges in terms of acquisition,
access, and maintenance.  Among the problems that can occur are: how to
facilitate contracts and licensing, how to handle individual e-journals
that require registration, authentication, and separate passwords, and
how to economically add MARC records to the OPAC for all e-journals.

We are contacting other libraries and would greatly appreciate your
responses to the following questions.  Feel free to respond to me off
list at kkriegel@sfpl.org. We will post a copy of our survey findings to
the listserv if we receive a sufficient number of responses.  If you
could possibly respond by August 1, we would appreciate it.  Feel free
to transmit this message to the appropriate staff person in your
library:

Questions:

Which OPAC system does your library use? (E.g. Millennium Silver)

Does your library have staff members who are solely dedicated to
acquiring and maintaining e-journals?

Does your library have a procedure for acquiring individual e-journals
that require contracts and/or licensing?  If so, what is it?

Does your library use a vendor for authentication and registration of
individual e-journals?  If so, which one? (E.g. EBSCO EJS Enhanced)  Has
this been successful?  Have you had any concerns using a vendor for
authentication and registration?

Does your library have a vendor that provides MARC records for e-journal
titles?  If so, which one? (E.g. SerialsSolutions)  Has this been
successful?  Have you had any concerns using this service?

Regarding the above question, are the e-journal records appended to the
paper records or are they loaded separately?  If loaded separately, is
staff satisfied with the quality of the MARC records?

Does your library have a vendor that provides an open URL linking
service?  If so, does it provide journal-level and/or article-level
linking?

Does your library have a procedure for handling electronic business
services?

Does your library have a procedure for handling e-mail journals?

Does your library review problems with e-journals and/or maintain a
problem log concerning e-journals?

Thank you very much for taking time from your busy schedule to respond
to this questionnaire.