2015 Charleston Library Conference

Outsourcing the management of electronic journals has significantly reduced the autonomy academic libraries have over their collection’s metadata, as well as the ways in which that data is summarized and made available to the library, yet the ephemerality of serials data makes quality-control burdensome and costly on the corporate end and necessitates ongoing title-tracking and database maintenance on the library’s end. As a result, the quality of data in outsourced knowledgebases is often inversely proportional to the library’s tolerance of “bad data,” as well as our inability to tell the difference. This session demonstrates how an MS Access database was constructed that integrates data from various sources in order to reconcile title lists from varied sources, process yearly subscription changes, and manage the distribution of work to departmental staff. As such, it both serves as a reconciliation tool with administrative functions for linking and displaying summary data about subscribed e-journal packages, and it provides a workflow tool with a user interface designed for staff to easily manage ongoing subscription maintenance. Serials are dynamic by nature, and a management system should have the ability to track and respond to these changes. This easily-maintained tool offers a model for managing change across the interrelated applications that manage subscriptions to online serials.