Date: Wed, 12 Mar 1997 09:23:41 -0500
From: SharonQuinn Fitzgerald <SharonQuinn_Fitzgerald@VOYAGER.UMERES.MAINE.EDU>
Subject: Managing E-journals (summary: long)

Good morning,

I promised to summarize responses I received to my questions regarding
management of e-journals.  I received a flurry of immediate replies but
then surprisingly no more.  Does this suggest that more often than not
e-journals are being handled outside Serials departments or is this
venture truly brave new territory?

In any case I had 7 posts, 3 from folks anxious to see the results and
four appended here which I found very helpful.  Thank you for
thoughtful replies!  A snapshot of our developing procedure and my
questions again with specific responses follow:

<<Hello Fellow Serials Librarians,

Here at the University of Maine we are starting to work with a plethora
of opportunities to provide access to e-journals as a by-product of our
paper subscriptions.  Managing this process is quite a challenge.  Here
are some of the steps we have been addressing:

1. Filling out registrations forms (each publisher has a slightly
different one of course)
2. Providing IP address lists (enlist help from our Systems Librarian
for this information)
3. Attaching "cyber" order records to our paper bib records (helpful
for review file in our III system)
4. Creating links from our bib records in our WebPac
5. Updating a web page devoted to e-journals for another point of
access.   This will include an evaluation form for our patrons so we
can make a more informed decision come the day we may have to choose
between paper and electronic subscriptions.  (Assuming we continue to
have that choice at least in the near future!)

In some cases we are working directly with publishers but in others the
"opportunity" has been brought to our attention by our vendor.   Titles
are selected for consideration by staff with collection development
responsibilities.

Some of my questions include the following:

1. Does your library handle e-journals through its Serials department
or does some other unit (eg. Systems) work out the mechanics?>>
MIT: serials works this out. If there are particular technical problems,
Systems is involved. I have been appointed to a new position, Asst.
Acquisitions Librarian for Digital Resources, and this position
is responsible for the orders, licenses, implementation, and license
compliance, in conjunction with collections and systems staff.

LAFAYETTE:  E-journals are handled through the Serials Department in
consultation,
where necessary, with the Systems Librarian.  The Library Director signs the
license agreements when that is required.  We deal directly with the
publishers at this point, because the offers have come directly to us,
not through our vendor.  Unless publishers and librarians develop some sort
of standard license agreement, I think to a certain extent we may always
need to deal more directly with the publisher than is the case for print
journals because of the complexity of many of the license agreements.
A license agreement which fits us won't necessarily work for you and vice versa.
I would imagine that it would be difficult to negotiate that sort of thing
through a vendor.

UCSD: UCSD has attempted to integrate processing into regular
workflows.  We don't have Serials Dept., so the ordering/license
agreements are done in
Acquisitions Dept., and cataloging done in Cataloging Dept.  We
reconfigured our organization, expanding serials cataloging to be the
"Digital Information and Serials Cataloging Unit" and we catalog all
serials and all computer files (CD's, diskettes, web sites, ejournals,
etc.)

HAVERFORD: I handle them all here in the Serials Dept.  Many of these
offers have been coming to the attention of the Science Librarian,
but most to me,
so we decided it would be best if one person handled them all.  The
bibliographers decide if we would like to provide access, then I handle
the applications, providing IP addresses, reading licensing agreements, etc.

<<2. Do you deal directly with publishers or prefer to work with a
vendor?>>

MIT: For most ejournals, we are dealing with the publisher. There is
so much to deal with in terms of licenses, etc., that the usual
streamlining available by using a vendor seems to disappear;
the need to directly work out the technical and license
details means we have to have a direct relationship anyway.

LAFAYETTE:We deal directly with the
publishers at this point, because the offers have come directly to us,
not through our vendor.  Unless publishers and librarians develop some sort
of standard license agreement, I think to a certain extent we may always
need to deal more directly with the publisher than is the case for print
journals because of the complexity of many of the license agreements.
A license agreement which fits us won't necessarily work for you and vice versa.
I would imagine that it would be difficult to negotiate that sort of thing
through a vendor.

HAVERFORD: I prefer to work directly with the publisher, because I've
found that not all of the offers are actually getting through via the
vendors.
Some publishers, though, specifically instruct one to subscribe to the
e-version through the vendor; these I obey.

<<3. Do you have procedures in place or in the works for integrating
the processing of e-journals with that of the more traditional
mediums?>>

MIT: Yes. Some procedures are still in process, but by and large
we have established the basics by creating my new job and by setting
up a couple of committees related to selecting and processing
eresources.

LAFAYETTE:At this point, our procedures for processing e-journals are
sort of ad hoc.  I'm currently doing almost all of the administrative
work and cataloging.  If any sort of technical setup needs to be done,
that is handled by the Systems Librarian.  For example, we will need to
install helper applications on our PC's in order to be able to print from JSTOR.
She, not I, will take care of that.  I think as time goes on and
e-journals become more commonplace we will need to integrate them fully into
our processing procedures so that we can enlist the assistance of support
staff members in handling them as we would traditional materials.  With things
still in such a state of flux, however, I've been hesitant to try to
train our support staff until I am reasonably sure of what I'm doing.

HAVERFORD:For the ones we order and pay for, the ordering process is the
usual one, but we have no procedures yet in place for checking on
accessibility of particular issues, claiming, etc.  Procedures need to
evolve that will enable us to do so for the many more e-titles that we
will soon be "subscribing" to.

<<4. Do you provide links through your opac and/or through a web page
interface for your library?>>

MIT: YES. We are not at this point decided on what we will catalog
in the OPAC but are involved in pilot cataloging projects. We set
up links from our web pages (both at a top level and in subject pages.)

LAFAYETTE: We are currently providing links to our e-journals through
our OPAC and through the Library's web page.  Within the next few months,
however, I expect to scrap this arrangement and provide access to individual
titles through the WebPAC only.  We'll probably leave some sort of a link to
the home page of each of the projects we participate in on the Library's web
page, but the sheer number of journals which we will be receiving
electronically has grown too large to make a list really usable.  As
part of Project Muse, we receive 42 titles and JSTOR will add another 100
over the next three years.  In addition, of course, we have a small number of
journals which we can access electronically because of our paper
subscriptions.  We have also been adding links to free e-versions of
serials which we receive in paper (especially government-issued publications).
Maintaining a list of all of these links would be quite a lot of work
and, philosophically, I think it's better for our patrons if they get used to
accessing these materials through the catalog which is a system they are
accustomed to already.

UCSD:We make lots of links in the OPAC, to sites on the internet, our
intranet, and for both electronic publications and related websites
associated with publications (e.g., tables of contents).  Our top
priority is stuff with license and pay for, then sites requested by
bibliographers, then others that we discover (e.g., all the CIC
Electronic Journals Collection).  The catalogers only maintain the OPAC
links although we let the relevant bibliographers know to change their
web pages if we happen to know they've put the titles on their web
pages.  (That sounds pretty disorganized, but the number of titles on
their web pages is still pretty manageable -- no doubt we'll have to
get a more formal mechanism later on).

HAVERFORD: I let the bibliographers know when access is set up to a
particular title so they can put a link to it on their subject Web page,
if they desire.  Some others I put on the News and Journals pages I maintain.
We are getting the Webpac within a few months.  We made a cataloging
decision that we would export the "computer file" format bibs for e-journals
we pay for; that's what I'm doing for those e-journals like Project Muse
titles.
These get their own bib and order record, plus an item record with a
location of "Lib Web Page," a status of "Online" and a message which
appears in the call number field, "Or access directly using URL"  (which
shows just above in the bib on the OPAC screen).  If these free
e-versions keep proliferating at the rate they are, I think we may have to
rethink our decision to catalog only those cyber-things we order and pay for.
Right now, for those free ones we decide to provide access to I'm inputting a
|z note in the 850 of the checkin record for the paper saying, "Recent
issues also available online; see Library's Web page."

5. If you provide both, does the maintenance process involve two steps
or do you have a system that
automatically makes the update at multiple access points?

MIT: We do not have any automatic updating -- I'm afraid I can't
imagine HOW this would work; we need the subject specialist to
decide where and how to link and what the text describing the product
on the web should be; we need catalogers deciding things like
one record or two, etc.; how this could all be automated I have
no idea.

UCSD:  We run a URL-checker program to catch
the URL's that change but we have a serious problem keeping up with
changes in content.

HAVERFORD: For those which we pay separately for, we provide access
both ways, involving several steps.

<<I have gleaned a lot from other discussions on this list and if folks
would like to respond directly to me, I would be happy to summarize for
the list.

Thanks in advance for your insights and experiences!

Sincerely,
Sharon Quinn Fitzgerald
Head, Serials
Fogler Library
University fo Maine>>
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