The Importance of Complaining

I hear a lot of complaints as a periodicals librarian and that is actually a good thing.  In fact, I wish I heard more complaining.  Here’s why.  Today we got a call from a faculty member who was complaining that his class had been accessing a journal through the periodicals holdings search last spring, but that the access was gone now.  Searching through our records, we realized that the title had gone from a print subscription to a microfilm only subscription back in 2003.  How had this professor been able to access the title electronically?  Turns out that the access was via one of our aggregator databases, ABI Inform/Global (ProQuest).  Sometime this summer, ProQuest decided to split up the full text of this one title into three distinct access points.   Unfortunately, neither our staff nor the staff of our link resolver (who is in charge of updating content from aggregator databases each month) was aware of this change.  So, even though full text for this one title was really available from 1982 to present, our periodicals holdings search only showed access to one access point, 1986-1987.  I manually went in and added access to the other two access points and the story ends happily.  I relate this story to you all to illustrate the importance of hearing your complaints.   Bring them on!

October 12, 2007. News.

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