[Eril-l] Procedures (and/or documentation) for matching e-journal entitlements lists against knowledge base coverage lists?

[Liisa S. Mobley]

Hi everyone-
We have not figured out a best practice for reconciling title lists, beyond hand-checking lists, which is extraordinarily time-consuming.  If someone can come up with a better means of getting accurate lists, which can be easily loaded into our various systems, then please share this information ☺.
Three or four years ago, at ER&L, someone, whose name I didn’t catch, used the phrase, “holdings entropy” to describe this phenomenon of inaccurate holdings.  It starts with a title list from the publisher which may or may not include previous titles, or may not be precisely correct, even with current titles.  On our end, we may forget or not realize that a title has ceased, changed to a new title, or changed publisher, furthering the inaccuracies.  As the years go by, and titles come and go, our various knowledgebases become even more inaccurate as there is a constant drift.
Since we are not yet at the point of getting easy to load, easy to maintain, 99%+ accurate lists, I am at least hoping to get to the point of manually checking our big publisher lists, and then doing minimal maintenance on them each year.  This goal is still out of reach, but we are slowly getting there.

I agree with Athena Hoeppner, who wrote in earlier, about her list of needs for vendor entitlement lists, which I will repeat here for emphasis:


  *   Consistent IDs for each journal on invoices, KBs, and vendor downloadable files (not just ISSN)
  *   Clear and consistent title history info:
     *   Current ISSNs with previous title and ISSN info and volume/years for each title/ISSN
     *   Display both current and historical title/ISSN on vendor sites. Lots of publishers show the full run for a journal under the current title and ISSN
Accurate, custom entitlement reports upon request, with an option to show all-accessible or perpetually owned entitlements

Thanks,
Liisa

Liisa Mobley
Electronic Resources Unit Supervisor, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY 14853
lsk24 at cornell.edu<mailto:lsk24 at cornell.edu>, phone (607) 255-3241, fax (607) 255-6110

From: Eril-l [mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org] On Behalf Of Diane Westerfield
Sent: Monday, November 28, 2016 3:49 PM
To: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org
Subject: Re: [Eril-l] Procedures (and/or documentation) for matching e-journal entitlements lists against knowledge base coverage lists?

This has been on my mind for years. The entitlement lists often don’t match exactly what you have access to on a vendor website, for reasons unknown to me. Not open-access, but often some partial run or ceased journal that’s not on the entitlement list but you still have full text access.  Also you may have extra years of full text beyond what the entitlement list is showing. I’m currently marching through one journal package and seeing that access frequently begins some or many years before the entitlement start year.

Also these entitlement lists don’t match up with link resolver lists or consortial lists. There is so much variability in how titles are listed, and title changes. And do you go through your scanned license PDFs and check for every title on those as well? And then there are those journal archives that somebody bought, before you started working there, so some journal runs start way early and others start at the same year. And then there’s the journal package where sometimes full text starts at 1996 and sometimes it’s 1997, and there’s no rhyme or reason as to which is which.

The other librarians here want me to reflect accurately what we have access to “in real life”, the maximum amount of full text access. If they find that 1999-2001 full text access to a random journal on XYZ Journal Package, they want it in the link resolver and catalog, entitlement list doesn’t matter. Similarly if ZYX journal package has a journal with full text access 1997-current but the entitlement started in 2008, they still want me to reflect the access back to 1997. So I can’t simply dump entitlement data into the link resolver without then going back through it – either the link resolver data title by title, or stepping through the title browse of the journal site, or both.

In general I would love to hear about best practices. How often should you do this? Are some journal vendors more tied to their entitlement lists than others? I’m the only one at my institution who does the “checking by hand” and you all know what a grind it is. If anyone has tips on dealing with title reconciliation burnout, I would love to hear it. No one else wants to work on this, and the fixes involved are so complicated (link resolver, ILS records, and ILS coverage database) that it scares other people off anyway.

To look for matches in two title lists: you can do a huge amount of title cleanup in Excel and Python. With two cleaned title lists in hand, run a query through MS Access; you can get all the fields from a matched title to sit neatly on the same line, eliminating the need for Excel VLOOKUP which is rather unwieldy. Don’t try to clean data in MS Access, it’s terrible for that. You can also use Conditional Formatting in Excel to find duplicates, but that’s only suitable for smaller data sets and won’t line up your data.

Thanks,

Diane Westerfield, Electronic Resources & Serials Librarian
Tutt Library, Colorado College
diane.westerfield at coloradocollege.edu<mailto:diane.westerfield at coloradocollege.edu>
(719) 389-6661


From: Eril-l [mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org] On Behalf Of Rebecca Kemp Goldfinger
Sent: Monday, November 28, 2016 11:53 AM
To: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>
Subject: [Eril-l] Procedures (and/or documentation) for matching e-journal entitlements lists against knowledge base coverage lists?

(Cross-posted)

Dear Colleagues,

Do you have a good method or set of procedures worked out for comparing e-journal entitlements lists against what is activated and/or able to be activated in your knowledge base (KB)?  I'm defining "entitlements lists" as lists of the e-journal titles and the subscribed/purchased coverage to which we are entitled.  These lists can be e-mailed by publisher representatives or downloaded from publisher websites.  Our knowledge base is WorldCat KB, and the KB files we compare against are KBART files, but I am interested in looking at procedures that anyone may be using, regardless of which KB you have.

We have tried using Excel's VLOOKUP functionality to match titles by unique identifier, but it seems as though there are lots of problems ​in the vendor supplied data ​that make it hard to compare coverage (and even titles, sometimes). A few problems we've run up against are entitlements lists that do not show all title changes with separate titles, ISSNs, and coverage for all the titles in the history, and entitlements lists that show separate lines for each subscribed year of the title, which makes it hard to pull together the true start date and end date into one KB entry.

If you have a process that you think works pretty well for matching up entitlements with what's available in the KB, would you mind contacting me?  I would love to learn about your process(es) and the tools you use. We are especially interested in automating the process with Excel or Google Sheet templates, if anyone has been doing that.​ Or are there any workshops or presentations that anyone knows of on this topic?

Has anyone had any success in getting better entitlements data from publishers?

Let me know if I need to clarify my request. Also, if there is interest in my gathering together responses and sharing to the lists, I would be happy to do that.

Many thanks for considering,
Rebecca

Rebecca Kemp Goldfinger
Continuing Resources Librarian
University of Maryland, College Park
Acquisitions Department, Room 2200
McKeldin Library, 7649 Library Lane
College Park, MD 20742
301-405-9309<tel:301-405-9309>  (phone)
301-314-1200<tel:301-314-1200> (fax)

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