I’ve just signed up for another online suite of journals, and discovered, with a sigh of relief, that I can set the client username and password. We have soooo many different logins and passwords for our clients, I don’t blame them for just dumping a lot of stuff into a document delivery request form. I hate the fact that we have one major suite of resources – from a centralised source – but because it’s a proprietary set of resources, I don’t like to use the password with their competitors’ resources. So we use the same login and a different password. But a third resource doesn’t give us the choice of login, so we must give an unintellligible string to our clients. Not to mention logins for individual journal subscriptions.
We can’t use IP addresses, there’s no way we’ll be allowed to run EZ Proxy or something similar, and it’s driving me nuts. I know about Athens, but it’s expensive for a small campus, and I don’t really want to be supporting individual logins – although I’m sure I’ll get there soon enough. Actually, I’d love to know how Athens goes with the way that Ovid and Ebsco are pushing individual accounts, where you have to login after you’ve logged into the main site.
Anyone with a magic solution out there?
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December 20, 2007 at 1:32 am
Michelle
We were a small hospital. Athens cost us about $1500. In the first month I had 150 people signed up. That may sound like a lot of money, but I would be willing to bet that if I told those 150 people that they would have to pay $10 for one year’s worth of access they would still jump for it.
After enabling Athens access our electronic resource usage shot up. We were getting a MUCH better return on investment on databases and journals that we were already paying money for. Electronic journal usage more than doubled.
I am not saying you should necessarily charge your users for cost recovery, but try presenting the costs in a different way to administration.
Simply illustrating how Athens improved our return on investment with other resources (USAGE STATISTICS) impressed my administration. They (not me) now brag about our library’s ability to provide off campus access and use it as another selling point to attract Residents and Interns to our hospital.