Dear all, Whilst we have always encouraged and welcomed feedback about Ingenta's services, it is a shock to read the comments posted to this list in recent days. Of course, no one wants to get a bad (not to mention public) review -- but we also don't want to deliver bad services, and we have worked enormously hard with the library community over the past few years to make the necessary changes and improvements to our service. We feel that the comments made on the list, or privately to Wendy Belcher, are not representative of today's Ingenta, and so we wanted to address them before this potentially slanderous discussion gets out of hand -- for example: "Ingenta turns off access for no reason". Of course we don't. Providing your access is our core business, and it is important to us not to screw that up. Comments on this subject likely result from last year, when we had some problems with publishers who (despite our requests) did not provide us with their renewal data prior to the end of our agreed gracing period. We honoured our gracing agreement with publishers but it caused many problems for libraries. This year, we have informed publishers that we will refuse to cut off graced access until they have correctly supplied their renewals, and we're part way through a very thorough plan to ensure last year's mistakes are not repeated. "extremely unresponsive and unhelpful; Unanswered phone calls, unanswered email, when I do get an answer it is some variation of "we can't" for whatever reason." The original poster made this comment about Extenza, now part of Atypon, not Ingenta. Ingenta's policy is to respond to emails to help@ingentaconnect.com within 12-24 hours. Again, we had problems with this during the height of the renewals problems last year. Since then, we have taken on more staff to make real improvements to our communications, and we are generally much quicker at responding to and resolving your problems. "I don't want to have to reregister every time I renew" Of course not, and we don't expect you to. Per the above explanation, renewals should happen without your intervention, but we had some problems last year -- which we have now implemented new procedures to avoid in future. Ultimately, we fully accept that we have not always delivered good service in the past, but with your input we thought we'd turned things around -- of 1600 respondees in our Nov 2005 library survey: *73% rated Ingenta "reliable" or "extremely reliable" *82% were happy with our customer service response & turnaround times If that's not your experience, please *tell us* what else we should be doing to improve. Ingenta has changed; let us prove that to you. Regards, Amel _________________________________________________________ Amel Abourachid Library and End User Services Manager Ingenta PLC Unit 1 Riverside Court, Bath, BA2 3DZ, UK T +44 1225 361113 F +44 1225 361155 E amel.abourachid@ingenta.com www.ingentaconnect.com Ingenta: Technology + Services for the Publishing and Information Industries. -----Original Message----- From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum [mailto:SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU]On Behalf Of Belcher, Wendy Sent: 2 March 2006 4:30 am To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU Subject: [SERIALST] Best Journal Hosting Sites Follow up I wanted to thank everyone so much for writing to me with your advice and thoughts re journal hosting! I thought you might be interested to hear what librarians had to say. First, librarians are extremely peeved with Ingenta. I don't think a single person wrote to me without warning in CAPS not to go with them. So, thank you, I definitely am not going to be going with them (or buying their stock any time soon). (see below for more comments) Second, lots of people liked JSTOR and MUSE and everybody insisted that just because old content was up on JSTOR or MUSE that they wouldn't cancel the subscription. I guess I should believe, but it's tough to take that leap of faith. If you might cancel, confess now! Third, people generally agreed that EBSCO and Highwire were the best bets. ************** Regarding Ingenta Cons: hard to reach. increasingly frustrating. turn off access for no apparent reason. slow in processing renewal information. avoid Ingenta, have a long history of being uncooperative with both libraries and publishers; cut off our access to dozens of titles in mid-March, said we were at fault, we confirmed our renewals with Ingenta the previous December. extremely unresponsive and unhelpful; Unanswered phone calls, unanswered email, when I do get an answer it is some variation of "we can't" for whatever reason. avoid Ingenta; they just close holdings and don't tell us; this happens with print-includes-electronic access subscriptions from small presses or associations; I don't want to have to reregister every time I renew. new problems arise all the time and never get resolved, terms and conditions are impossible to determine, trying to activate new titles is a shot in the dark, multiple accounts are established and get mixed up as new titles are added and so on. very slow; slow to get back with you when you have a problem. very bad since it is so hard to register and the access seems to come and go without warning or logic. Pros: Their website is pretty easy to use though. Ingenta gets you a hosting service combined with a destination site, which might boost traffic. Ingenta's prices are very competitive ************** Regarding HighWire Cons: True that it's a little tricky to use for some things. Excellent but not the cheapest option. a destination and traffic point but more if you are in the biomed area encourages publishers to make back file content freely available. Pros: gives you a lot of information about the journals which is very useful. very responsive. very good. we don't find it difficult at all and we already have lots of e-journals there. by far the easiest to search, print, and browse from the patron's perspective; I rarely have to walk users through finding articles when they are on a Highwire journal; That is not always the case with Ingenta and aggregators. If your terms are "single-site free-with-print", I would definitely contact Highwire; They've been around a long time, so they probably know their stuff, and now is probably a good time to get assistance from them, because they're not adding journals left and right anymore; They have design templates and license "boilerplate" language that you can use as-is or adapt as desired; They've been working with people just like you, so even if their system seems confusing, I'd bet they can make it easy for you; From my point of view as a librarian, I know what to expect from Highwire and how it works; I know what to do when something goes wrong and feel confident I can straighten it out; From the librarian perspective they are very easy to maintain (IP addresses) and deal with ************** Regarding We Don't Cancel if the Free Old Content Is on Line --We don't cancel any subscriptions if the content is also available in JSTOR due to the fact JSTOR does not contain current content. We do cancel subscriptions if the content is in Project Muse, but that is because we don't want to pay twice for the same content. We look at Project Muse as a Big Deal sort of package. --Also, because they host humanities titles we haven't cancelled our print subscriptions We've used the online versions as a supplement, but the humanities are one area where most of our patrons insist we keep print subscriptions --My library doesn't cancel print subscriptions because of JSTOR coverage, but we do cancel microfilm subscriptions because we rely on JSTOR for the back-file. On the other hand, we do often cancel print subscriptions if we have Project Muse coverage, as long as we also have a back-file, either in microfilm or in JSTOR. I--'d vote for Project MUSE and JSTOR if possible. We have not cancelled our subscriptions just because they are included in one or both of these. PM is strong in the humanities and social sciences, so this would be a good fit. I'm sorry that libraries have chosen to cancel, but it may be due to tight budgets, unfortunately. --Project Muse has current content so some libraries may cancel subscriptions outside of Muse, although publisher will still be getting revenue from having journals in a Muse package. On the other hand, JStor contains older content only; I doubt any library will be cancelling a current subscription because that journal is covered by JStor, unless they really didn't want the title anyway, regardless of format or coverage.
