From: Kenneth Murr <krmrr_at_CLEMSON.EDU>
In August, I had a request from our Resource Sharing staff to help with a
citation to CATALYST TODAY. The citation referred to an article starting
on page 415 of vol 28, n. 4. Since we subscribe to ScienceDirect, they
had tried to get the article from there but the online version only went up
to page 389. I verified the article using Web of Science and a kind
reference librarian from VA Tech went to the shelf and verified that the
article really did exist in print while I waited on the telephone.
We reported the error to Science Direct and received, at least to me, very
disturbing news: "As of today we have under 2% of our
journal content missing. " My first thought was "Oh my, .02% would be bad,
this is terrible." Some of my colleagues here at Clemson were unconcerned
and assured me that it was not that bad. After all, we have had missing
issues, torn out pages, etc. before. I responded that yes, but we had
procedures to deal with such things. Our acquisitions system automatically
notifies us if issues are late, we order individual issues, interlibrary
loan missing pages, etc. What do we do if the publisher has errors? How
can I know as I look at the online journal which stops at page 389 that
there are really 6 more articles unlisted. My friends re-assured me that
Elsevier would correct the errors just as they said they would in their
response to us. Well, it's been a month and with no change. During this
time, patrons have reported other missing articles and even missing issues.
This has forced me to reconsider my support for "going all
electronic". Our Libraries' goal is to go as completely electronic as
possible and I had supported that very strongly.
Have any of you, noticed problems with electronic sources?
Thanks
Kenneth R. Murr
Clemson University Libraries
Clemson, SC 29634
Received on Fri Oct 05 2001 - 07:23:09 EDT