Hello all, A few days ago I asked this incredibly helpful list if any of you have had to change IP addresses for your e-journals and e-resources. I've created a summary of the responses I received and listed them below. Almost everyone who responded indicated that they created a spreadsheet with the contact information for all of their vendors, and noted on the sheet when the change had been made by that vendor. Thank you so much to everyone who responded! The information I gathered will be a tremendous help as we proceed to change our IP addresses. Best regards, Amanda -------------------------------------------------- 1. We sent our site description to all publisher with whom we had contracts and emphasized the change of IP address. The site description is posted at the end of this e-mail. An explanation of why you need to make the change will help. Publisher naturally question why the request for change/addition of an IP address is being made. We also asked our subscription agent to notify all publishers and to change the information in their system for renewals and updates. Having someone check access to products as they are adding the IP address would be a good idea because I am sure some will need to be handled by more than an e-mail. 2. In the end I sent an e-mail to each vendor I could (but copied a really generic message) with the old IP and the new IP ranges with a VERY brief explanation of why we were changing and the effective dates. Some checked for ownership of the IP and wanted to know if we were exclusive users of the range. Some entered our new IP and left the old one in place until it was replaced and asked me to contact them after the date of the change. At least one required a call to a customer service no. (CCH) I killed a few trees and kept paper copies of the interchanges , and checked to see if I got questions or confirmations. 3. I recently had to do this--I tried to be efficient and send a single email message to all my various tech support addresses with a "return receipt requested". Unfortunately, just because someone opened your email doesn't mean anyone a)read it or b)acted on it. I sent out my message 3 months in advance of the IP change but I still had a fair number of vendors that didn't implement the change. If I had to do it again, I would make myself a little spreadsheet with the tech support contact info for each of my vendors to keep track of communications and get a confirmation and a person's name for each. 4. I know of no alternative to logging into each applicable administrative module and editing the ranges. It does ease the process a bit if you work from a list of all the affected databases and serials and the administrative logins (URL, customer ID, login name, password). I created a list of my own, but I understand those ERM products (e.g. from Serials Solutions) can help. 5. Unfortunately I've had to do this more often than I would have liked. At least it hasn't occurred since I started registering individual serial titles through EBSCO's enhanced EJS registration tracker. Generally we had a hot cutover, so one day we were one set of IP numbers and the next day the new ranges. For all our databases, etc. it required a two step process. About a week or so before the cutover I contacted all our providers and added the new ranges. Some vendors allow you to maintain your own IP ranges through their administrative sites. I did those first. Then emailed the support/help contacts for the others, requesting a confirmation that the numbers had been added. I kept a list of all our vendors and recorded the contacts and confirmations. After the cutover, I went back and deleted the old IPs, but I could do that at my leisure. The godsend was keeping that list of contacts, because I had to go through the process three years in a row. EBSCO updated many of the online journals for us, but some publishers won't allow a third party to handle such updating. I live in fear of hearing the news that we're changing ISPs again! 6. I had to do this recently. With Ebsco, I sent the new ranges to my account representative. She handled all the online titles that we get through them. Project Muse, Jstor. For the individual titles that we get directly from the publishers, I contacted the publishers' customer support and notified them individually. There were a few that I had to get back to the customer support people because of some technical issue on their end. We also use SFX, there were some issues on their end, which also got fixed. On the whole it was not too big of an issue for us. 7. I made a list of all the resources, and then went to websites and found technical support email addresses and sent them emails. I asked for a response. I just manually checked off the ones I had done and gotten responses from. If you have an ERM, you can probably group them by provider, and you also probably have the contact information stored. Even so, I can't think of a way that this could be automated. Also, there are always those providers that do not respond. Then of course, there is the testing to make sure it worked. The major change I had to make was our outbound proxy IP, and it was impossible to test because all the computers I have access to are within our network. 8. Currently we do not have an ERM system and we do not have any single database or spreadsheet that will keep track of all vendors. I have created spreadsheet of all vendors/publishers and found e-mail for Technical Support on the web site. Then I have e-mailed our IP change request to those vendors. They usually respond. In some instances I can change IP addresses through Admin module on the vendor's web site (that's the easiest way). There were some difficult situations when the vendor will say that I am not an Administrator for our site and they can change IP only by the request of an Administrator. Usually they gave me the name that they had in their client database. Fortunately this person is still here, so I was able to ask her to send them an e-mail as well as to request to add my name as an Administrator. I kept track on my spreadsheet of the dates I have contacted the vendor and the outcome, whether and when the IP has been changed. So that I know that I need to follow up with some of them. Overall it was a very time-consuming project. The good thing was that we needed to delete the IP that was no longer used by [institution name deleted]. Amanda Z. Okandan E-Resources Training and Outreach Librarian Sandia National Laboratories Technical Library (505)284-0219 (p) azeigle@sandia.gov http://infoserve.sandia.gov
