RE: Librarians push back against complicated e-packages

["Peter Picerno" <ppicerno@nova.edu>]

As an addendum to this is the added non-value of each publisher having to
re-invent the wheel for access protocols for their titles. We get all of
our titles (print as well those which come with electronic access and are
not part of bundled databases) through our serials jobber and while some
-- I almost would say many -- of the titles' electronic access is
implemented through that agency (the jobber) there are still those
publishers who can not or will not work through the jobber to set up
access which means that our IT people are jumping through numerous hoops,
making phone calls to publishers which go un-returned for weeks or months,
sending e-mails to publisher contact people which are apparently
disregarded, and the bottom line is that we pay for a subscription to
which we don't have access for as much as a quarter of its payment time. I
don't know whether publishers don't or won't trust jobbers interactions
with their clients regarding this, or whether they can't deal with the
concept of access, but the end result is that the access problems are
complicated enough that it gets very tempting to say 'forget it' to those
titles where we end up paying for what amounts to reduced value because of
the difficulties in access. Is there a way around this? I'd look forward
to hearing from anyone who has managed to circumvent these time-consuming
problems!

Peter Picerno

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu]On Behalf Of Richard Jasper
Sent: Monday, June 16, 2003 6:50 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: Librarians push back against complicated e-packages

Many thanks for passing this along, Ann.

I don't know about the rest of you, but processing our electronic renewal
for One Very Big Publisher is something that annually takes probably about
a month's worth of time on the part of one of our collection management
coordinator's, plus about a week's worth of input from our acquisitions
librarian AND me.

Decades ago librarians said "enough already!" when dealing with individual
publishers and HAPPILY agreed to pay subscription agents a service fee so
that we wouldn't have to go through this rigamarole.

Richard P. Jasper
Director, Resource Services
Wayne State University Libraries
Detroit, MI 48202