Organization Monkey

one of the difficulties in managing electronic resources is that we never see them. because we never see them we don’t know when there are access problems like a broken link, a missing issue, or a change in holdings. to help us manage these hidden resources we’ve decided to create a check-in record for each of our electronic journal titles, just like we do for our print journals. when we activate the check-in record we can tell it how frequently to prompt us to check access. we’ve decided that for our 50 most used titles we will check access two times a year, and for all other titles we will check access once a year. by checking access we intend to use the url from our catalog record to go to the resource and download a pdf from the earliest available issue and the most recent issue, and also check to see that our holdings are accurate (we have access to what we say we have access to).

creating a check-in record for the electronic journal takes about two minutes for each title. based on the size of our current e-journal collection, we anticipate checking access to about 55 titles a week. we plan to have a student worker do the initial check, and if there are any problems or questions a full-time staff member will review the title and take action for corrections.

this project was spurred by amanda yesilba’s 2006 nasig presentation, “old is new again: using established workflows to handle electronic resources.”