Another tip from Rita: records for Harvard Business Review case studies (or things that look like they might be records for them) are turning up in confusing places. We’ve all known for a long time that the only way students or faculty can get full text access to Harvard Business Review case studies is to buy them directly from the publisher. But our students will often see things in our databases that look like they might give access. Here are some examples that Rita recently alerted me to.
Article Records That Are About a Case Study
Here is an example of an article record in Web of Science (that can also be found in OneSearch) has a title that can easily lead some users to think that it contains the full text. Note that it includes a “Find It @ CUNY” button. If the user were to click that, they’d get a window suggesting that full text is not available but that the item could be requested via ILL, which in fact would not be possible.
This situation is not unlike those articles that turn up in Factiva announcing the publication of some marketing report that leads users to think we must have access to it somewhere.
Records in Business Source Complete for Case Studies
Until today, I didn’t know that EBSCO has indexed all of the Harvard Business School case studies. If you go to this publications listing for “Harvard Business School Cases” in Business Source Complete, you can browse all the records that are included. Here’s a sample record for one of these indexed case studies:
Note that this record, too, also features a “Find It @ CUNY” button. Clicking that button will also lead you to a window that mistakenly gives the impression that the item can be ILLed.
What To Do
When users ask about the case studies, there’s not much more we can do than steer them to the publisher’s website to purchase them. We’ll bring these issues up with EBSCO and Ex Libris to see if there’s something to be done about the way link resolvers display for HBR case studies, as this special content breaks the usual patterns and rules we have about ILL, full text access, etc.