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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 [log in to unmask]