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
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