Yesterday, we saw the return of a recurring problem with the e-journal portal. Searches took forever or sometimes failed to go through at all. This morning, the system seems to be fine again. The vendor (Serials Solutions) emailed customers yesterday to let us know that they were aware of the intermittent problems over the past 9 months and are still working to permanently fix them.
In case this problem crops up again, we can use a newly developed e-journal tool from SFX that works the same way. This tool is something that the SFX Committee at CUNY is going to be looking at and exploring (is the knowledgebase behind it as accurate and user friendly as the one from Serials Solutions? can the interface be customized as much as the Serials Solutions one? etc.). It is not a replacement, just a back up tool we can use when the Serials Solutions e-journal portal is acting up.
Thanks Stephen for this information. It is useful and I have been able to make use of the “Serials Directory” to determine what databases carry specific serials too.
How do we get to the SFX ejournals tool from the library’s homepage? If it is not there, it would be great to add this temporary feature somewhere on the library’s homepage.
Given that the SFX e-journal portal site hasn’t been tested yet for accuracy, reliabiilty, etc., it’s probably not a good idea to put a link to it on the library website where our users might find it. I just revised the page in the Library Services wiki for “full text journals” to include the link as well as your excellent suggestion to also use the Serials Directory. https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/confluence/display/lib/Full+Text+Journals
I understand the issue of adding a permanent link on the library’s homepage for something that we are using temporarily because of the problems with Serials Solutions e-journal search.
For immediate access, I just decided to bookmark it on Chrome and I would suggest others may want to do so too.
I use this e-journals tool often when chatting with users, thus it is vital to gain access to it quickly, without many successive clicks.