RE: Blackwell journals now on Wiley InterScience

["Tracey Reeves" <tracey.reeves@adelaide.edu.au>]

Christina,

I absolutely agree with you, with the Blackwell Synergy interface 
you could clearly tell which years you had access to and which 
ones you don't via the green dots, however with Wiley you just 
have to test them. The holdings we downloaded from the Wiley 
admin site are fairly useless, and the dates rarely correspond to 
what we actually have. So we are going through the process of 
checking of what we actually do have now.

What I do like is that they are beginning to deal with the title 
changes in a much better way, if you go to All Issues you can see 
which content is under which title, whereas with Synergy you only 
had the current title at the top.

My colleague and have discussed the fact that they should have 
run the Synergy interface parallel with Wiley until the changes 
to the Wiley platform early next year, however I must say there 
has been plenty of communication from Wiley on the progress of 
the change and given the massive amounts of work involved in the 
migration, I feel that they have done an excellent job under the 
circumstances. There are some issues that need ironing out, but 
this is to be expected and should hopefully be resolved soon.

Tracey Reeves
Electronic Resources Officer
Barr Smith Library 
University of Adelaide, AUSTRALIA

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Pikas, Christina K.
Sent: Friday, 4 July 2008 9:09 am
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: Blackwell journals now on Wiley InterScience

I was amazed that they would even try to do this switchover in 
one weekend. No matter how long they've been planning it.

Compare:

A model of success has been the move of AAS journals from 
University of Chicago Press to IOP.  We're talking orders of 
magnitude fewer files, with extensive planning, running both 
systems in parallel, and turning on of the access controls only 
after making certain that everything moved properly.

Not to mention the fact that representatives from AAS and IOP 
have done a really thorough job of communicating the progress and 
asking for feedback.

Even in systems where there have been fairly big interface 
problems, the vendor has run old and new interfaces in parallel 
for up to 6 months or so. (Think Web of Science, Lexis-Nexis, and 
currently EbscoHost).

If you look at the spreadsheet of missing or corrupted files - 
you'll see anywhere from 1 to like 16,000.  What *are* we 
supposed to do if we need something from the journal with 16k 
missing files (a typo, I hope)? Wait till mid July?

The other irritating thing is that I actually liked the Synergy 
interface and I don't like Interscience. Sigh.  Happy long 
weekend for those of you in the U.S.

Christina K. Pikas, MLS
R.E. Gibson Library & Information Center 
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory