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

[Rebecca Kemp Goldfinger]

*Cross-posted*

Hi, all- I finally had the chance to summarize the responses to my listserv
query from November 28, 2016 on this topic, sorry for the delay.  Here's my
summary, with many thanks to those who responded, as well as some requests
that I have for publishers and KB vendors.

Problem Space:

   -

   Need to compare 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.
   -

   For the most part, publishers do not format entitlements lists in
   Knowledge Bases And Related Tools (KBART) format, see
   http://www.uksg.org/kbart .
   -

   Selected additional problems with entitlements lists:
   -

      Entitlements lists that do not show all title changes with separate
      titles, ISSNs, and coverage for all the titles in the history
      -

      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.
      -

   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).
   -

   My requests:
   -

      “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?”


Summary of Responses:

   -

   Multiple people indicated that they are attempting to check title lists
   “by hand,” and that this is a time-consuming process.
   -

   Per Adam Rusbridge (a.rusbridge at ed.ac.uk), the SafeNet project (
   http://safenet.blogs.edina.ac.uk/) is working on building an
   “entitlements registry” for UK higher educational institutions, and thus
   has an interest in how publishers record entitlements. The people involved
   in SafeNet are working with folks at KBART. RKG note: I’m sure more
   information will be forthcoming from this project.
   -

   Matching techniques for matching entitlements files against KB files
   (these are at a bird’s eye view, not very detailed):
   -

      Process courtesy of Diane Westerfield (
      Diane.Westerfield at coloradocollege.edu):
      -

         Complexity of process varies by the data quality of each source
         file.
         -

         Split KB files into 3 pieces: (1) titles with ISSN as match point,
         (2) titles with eISSN as match point, (3) titles with no
identifier, which
         will need to be compared separately.
         -

         Using Access, match titles with ISSN against each other to
         determine which should be activated.
         -

         Using Access, match titles with eISSN against each other to
         determine which should be activated.
         -

         For titles with no ISSN, perform clean-up on titles using Excel
         and/or Python string-slicing scripts to eliminate initial
articles, convert
         ampersands to “and,” replace double spaces, delete incorrect
diacritics.
         -

         Using Access, match on title, exporting the titles to be
         activated. (Alternatively, Diane has also learned how to
match titles using
         Python.)
         -

         Recombine all titles to be activated, activate in KB.
         -

      Process courtesy of Christine Blackman (cblackma at williams.edu):
      -

         Using a unique identifier for titles (e.g., publisher title IDs
         from unique URLs), use nested OR/EXACT array formula, e.g.,
         '{=OR(EXACT(M2,DataInAlma!H$2:H$725))}') to determine exact
matches (value
         returned by the formula = “TRUE”) that should be activated in the KB.
         -

         Sort the sheet for only the exact matches, and activate these.
         -

      Process courtesy of Chenwei Zhao (chenwei.zhao at gmail.com) - this is
      for comparing coverage dates to determine whether titles are
earlier titles
      in a title history and whether or not they should be activated in the KB.
      It is also used to determine which start and end coverage dates should be
      used as the start date and end dates in the KB file.
      -

         In comparing date ranges between entitlements files and KB files,
         use the LEFT and RIGHT functions to reformat dates to make
them comparable.
         -

         Use IF function to compare dates and determine whether titles
         should be activated or not.


Requests for holdings information from publishers and KBs:

   -

   Entitlements files to be sent to KBs should reflect all titles and
   coverage years for which libraries have access (not just perpetual access).
   -

   Please format entitlements files in KBART format, and likewise, please
   allow KBs to accept KBART formatted files.
   -

   Publishers: please reflect all title changes in the entitlements files with
   separate titles, ISSNs, coverage dates, and coverage enumeration for all
   the individual titles in the title history.
   -

   Publishers: please consolidate all consecutive entitled years into one
   entry per title, rather than reporting a separate entry for each individual
   year of entitled content.
   -

   Ideally, publishers should be able to send the entitlements files over
   to the KB in an automated fashion, so that libraries do not need to
   reconcile the lists. I understand that some vendors are already doing this,
   and hopefully more vendors will join this effort.


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  (phone)
301-314-1200 (fax)
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