Several people sent me mail requesting that I post the results of the survey of Uncover Reveal Alert site license holders which I posted way back in November, 1995. Here is my original message: >We are considering replacing our manual Current Awareness Service >(tables-of-contents) with a commercial electronic service. I would like >to speak (or write) to individuals from any libraries which have Uncover >Reveal site licenses and are offering this service to their users. >Specifically, I'd like to know how you are keeping track of who has >signed up, how you handle it when someone leaves your institution, and >whether or not you are charging your users for this service (and, if so, >how you are handling this). Please contact me personally, so we don't >clutter up the list. I will be happy to summarize the responses for the >list if people express an interest in the results. >Thanks in advance for any help you can give. I heard from ten different places who were using the Reveal Alert Service site license offered by CARL. Of these ten, eight specifically stated that they do not charge their users for using the library's site license to receive tables of contents. Two respondents didn't mention anything about charges so I don't know for certain if they charge or don't charge. There were several reasons given for providing this service free of charge to the user community. One person summed up the reasons very well by stating that "Reveal is part of our program to support extended access to information resources via document delivery and electronic services in lieu of extensive serial holdings." In addition, providing the service free creates good will for the library on campus and eliminates the necessity of keeping detailed records for billing purposes. From personal experience I can add that it is much easier and less time consuming not to charge as well. CMU Libraries is charging our users who want accounts through our Reveal Alert site license. An individual annual subscription through CARL costs $20.00 We are charging our users $15.00 annually to be part of our license. We intend only to recover costs and if we determine that we have enough subscribers to the service to offer it at a lower rate and still cover the cost of the license, then we will lower the price next year. We keep a record of all profiles that we create, along with user and billing information about each. We use that record to do the annual billing and to have a list of paid, current subscribers which we can compare against any lists we ask CARL to generate of Reveal Alert users subscribed under our site license. Yes, it is possible for a member of our campus community to sign on to Reveal Alert without going through the library and giving us their billing information. If the email address in their user profile is in the CMU domain, then they will be counted as being part of our site license. We expect to be able to surface those users not registered through the Libraries by having CARL generate lists periodically of all users under our domain. If the names on the CARL list are not also on our list, then we will contact them and straighten it out (idealistic, aren't I). The majority of libraries with Reveal Alert site licenses take on the task of creating profiles and adding the desired titles to that profile for their users. CARL does provide site license holders with detailed instructions for creating profiles, adding titles for the contents alert service, and setting up stored search strategies. These instructions can be copied and sent out to users. A few libraries (CMU included) create the profiles for their users, but do not add the list of titles to that profile that will trigger the tables of contents alerting service. Users are instructed to do that themselves. Every respondent expressed general satisfaction with the Reveal Alert service, although since the tables of contents go directly to users' email accounts, the library only hears about difficulties with the service if users bring their complaints to them. Certain disadvantages to electronic tables of contents services did emerge. These include: 1. a 75 character limit for stored search strategies (this is essentially a way to select tables of contents based on subject rather than journal title). 2. search strategies only search words in title (no subject headings or descriptors exist), so if the title doesn't really reflect the content of the article, then the user is not alerted to the article. 3. confusion can arise over who is responsible for charges incurred when users order articles on CARL. 4. Uncover may not contain all the titles that your library subscribes to and that your users may want contents from. I received several worthwhile suggestions from people that I will reproduce here: 1. Designate one person as the site license coordinator who will act as the contact person for CARL and for your users. 2. One location recommended sending a memo to all of your subscribers stressing the following points: * the tables of contents come directly from CARL and the library never sees them. If there are problems, please bring them to the library's attention. * articles you learn about through the alerting service may be available free of charge from your library's collection or through your interlibrary loan department. If you order them through CARL, you are responsible for any charges incurred. 3. Be very careful of typos when creating profiles, especially when entering the email address. 4. One location requires users of Reveal Alert to complete a profile registration form. This form includes blanks for the user's name, email address, department, campus address, campus phone number, fax number, password, etc. They use this form to create the user's profile on CARL. Once the profile is created, they send instructions on using Reveal Alert along with the profile number and password. (I liked this ideas, so that's what we're doing here at Carnegie Mellon, too). Here's a recommendation of my own. I would like to point out something to any library that may be considering charging their users for this service. Your institution may already have several people on campus who already have profiles in CARL's Uncover database. These profiles may represent users who are signed up and are paying customers of the Reveal Alert service or they may just be profiles that someone uses to order the occassional article from Uncover. They could also represent long dead accounts that the person who created it has already forgotten about (no, CARL doesn't purge these profiles, ever, unless asked to do so). If these profiles have an email address in them that is in your domain, then their profile will be counted when CARL determines your number of subscribers. Of course, the cost of your site license is based on the number of subscribers with your domain name in their email address, so it is in your best interests to clean out any "dead" profiles and to eliminate email addresses from profiles that are only used to order articles. CARL does not help you with this in any way, except to follow the instructions you give them about these accounts. CARL does not go into each profile in your domain to tell you if the profile holder is a paid, current subscriber to Reveal Alert or not. You need to take care of this yourself, and it can be time consuming. In Carnegie Mellon's case, I discovered we had 97 people who already had profiles on CARL before we bought a site license. Only seventeen of these represented current subscribers, who then became part of the Libraries' site license. The other eighty profiles were either deleted or had the email address stripped from them. In order not to delete any paid accounts, I had to contact each profile holder for information. I did it via email, but it still took a while and confused people no end. I did hear from one location who decided against the site license because they didn't think they would have enough users to make it worth their while. Instead, they subsidize individual subscriptions to Reveal Alert. This has so far proved cost effective for them. I want to thank everyone who responded for their time and their suggestions and input. If anyone has any further questions, please feel free to contact me. Joan ****************************************************************************** Joan Ellen Stein Head, Resource Sharing Carnegie Mellon University Libraries Hunt Library, Frew Street, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213 (412) 268-5826 office phone (412 268-6944 fax ******************************************************************************
