Our technical services staff have put together a proposal for a new
workflow tool to help them with semi-comprehensive access verification
for our electronic collection. The problem, apparently, is that while
many libraries have used print serial check-in for years to ensure that
print issues are received, similar workflows have never been put in
place to verify that we have access to the electronic collections that
we have purchased. And we spend more money on these collections than we
do on print. Currently, there is a tool called SEESAU that was developed
at Georgia and is used by staff to queue up resources for access
verification on a regular basis and also provides a kind of integrated
ticketing / bug tracking when problems are identified.
Our staff is interested in doing something similar here at NCSU so that
they have a mechanism (better than a spreadsheet) for proactively
verifying that we still have access to the journals and years that we
have subscribed to. It is apparently not uncommon for vendors to drop
journals or date ranges from journals so that our patrons cannot access
them even when we have paid for access. In addition, there are sometimes
problems in our local systems that prevent access, like EZProxy
configurations.
While we could certainly build a workflow tool for our staff to do this,
we wondered if there wasn't a clever, more automated solution that
wouldn't require so much manual labor by techincal services staff. We
are just bringing Nagios up for local system monitoring purposes, and
while it could certainly be used for at least a small portion of this,
the problem is that we would have to configure each journal manually in
Nagios for it to check that the proper coverage years were provided (and
this would break if the vendor re-designed its website). That would be a
ton of manual work for the IT office when we subscribe to tens of
thousands of journals. In addition, users can get authentication
problems at MANY steps in the process....everywhere from the journal
page in a vendor site down to when they click on the pdf for a single
article itself. It seems like it would be very difficult to account for
all of these possible problems within Nagios.
Has anyone come up with a clever way to do this type of access
verification that goes beyond just whether or not the vendor's site is
responsive?
thanks!
-emily
--
Emily Lynema
Associate Department Head
Information Technology, NCSU Libraries
919-513-8031
emily_lyn...@ncsu.edu
