From: "Grudzien, Pamela A." <grudz1pa_at_cmich.edu>
Hello everyone:
About six months ago, Central Michigan University Libraries was
faced with a decision about continuing our access to what was formerly
called Elsevier’s Academic Freedom Collection. We had subscribed to
the package of Academic Ideal e-journal collection since 1998 through
our consortium. Elsevier wasn’t willing to work through consortium
arrangements and wasn’t willing to provide the group of journals as a
package any longer. CMU Libraries’ acquisitions budget had been cut
and we were facing yet another reduction. We could not afford to
subscribe individually to all the previously owned journals via
ScienceDirect. We renewed 34 titles in print. We also could not
afford to pay the annual access fee to maintain ScienceDirect linking
to the backfiles. We chose the option of receiving the Ideal/Freedom
journal backfile data that we had purchased by our several years of
subscriptions. Elsevier sent us 8 DLT tapes about two months after
our request for the data. After another frustrating two months of
locating the outdated tape drives needed to open and access the tapes,
we have discovered that there is duplicated data and that the data
does not appear in any kind of rational order.
Has anyone out there taken this same decision and have you been able
to access your data in a reasonable way? If so, would you please
reply directly to me? I would greatly appreciate your sharing your
experiences.
Thank you!
Pamela Grudzien
Head, Collection Development
203 Park Library
300 East Preston Street
Mt. Pleasant, MI 48859
Voice: 989-774-6422
Fax: 989-774-4499
Received on Thu Jul 29 2004 - 08:17:32 EDT