Within the last year we purchased Serials Solutions as a product to manage our electronic journals. I decided to write about our experiences with the product.

First you must understand we are a medical library. Originally we had a collection of about 800 concurrent journal titles, of which we had approximately 400 titles available online. Approximately two years ago we became a part of the OhioLINK consortia. With our consortia membership, the amount of journals we had online access to exploded. All of a sudden we had access to over 16,000 journals through various online means. Our simple HTML web page listing our 400 journals was not going to cut it. For about a year we tried running two seperate lists. One list was the 400 titles that we owned and the other was the giant list of OhioLink journals. Simply put our patrons hated it. I can't blame them. I mean who (other than the librarians) would know what is an OhioLINK journal and what isn't which list to really search. Our big problem was how to merge the two lists into something one person could manage. We looked at various other OhioLINK institutions to see how they were handling the issue. At the time most had two lists or just had a list to the OhioLINK journals (not a list of their journals). One library, Cleveland State, was looking into a product called Serials Solutions to manage their lists.

Pros of Serials Solutions:
It was very easy to set up. You check all of the databases and online sources through which you get full text journals. They are flexible enough to allow you to select a whole database of journals as accessible or you can pick and choose various titles within the database. For journals not listed in their large list you create an Excel file listing the journalt title, issn, and the url.

Libraries have the option of using their Web Portal. The Web Portal is hosted on their site and provides; a single point of access for journals, combines your A-to-Z Title List, Title Searching and Subject Browsing functionalities, updates library-specific data daily and content provider data continuously, reduces your time spent managing and hosting HTML reports, includes your electronic and print holdings. No more uploading HTML documents.

Serials Solutions also offers a product called Article Linker. Article Linker is a full-featured OpenURL resolver that provides features above and beyond Serials Solutions' Journal Linker. Article Linker features links directly to the article level (when supported by the content provider), as well as links to ILL and other extended services. A new feature is Article Linker Customization, which provides more control over your Article Linker results pages and end-user experience. These customizations include; results ranking by Content Provider, deduplication of Results Page links, and 1-Click to Article performance.

Currently we do not have Article Linker, we are investigating it for next year to provide full text access to journal articles in Ovid. We have had a miserable time getting Ovid's Links@Ovid to work for us and we hope Article Linker will solve our problems. So far it looks like it will.

Serials Solutions has just added a usage statistics and overlap analysis. Currently the usage statistics only say how often somebody has done a search on Serials Solutions, but they intend to get it to the journal level. Overlap would be helpful for libraries that are broad and not specialized. Since we are a medical library we appear to have a huge overlap in the medical and science areas...huh go figure.

Document delivery programs such as Illiad work within Serials Solutions. As of right now we do not have a document delivery program, but we will be getting one shortly. I will let you know more when I know more about that.

For those people who want to include their electronic journals in their Catalog they offer a MARC service. It allows you to easily and efficiently integrate your electronic serials information into your OPAC. Inclusion of the MARC records returns your OPAC to its central role as the single, comprehensive access point for your library’s entire collection. All of your holdings - print, electronic, microform - will be in one location, allowing you and your patrons to know immediately what is in your collection, and where to find it. We do not use this feature. Because we are a medical library and OhioLINK has electronic journals in all different subjects, we felt we didn't want to include records to non-medical resources in our catalog.

Serials Solutions support have always been helpful. Their support answers email questions, within that day or the next day. They have been easy to get a hold of and seem genuinely interested in constructive feedback.

Cons to Serials Solutions:
You do give up some authority when going to Serials Solutions, especially if you are trying to synthesize a cosortia collection. Before when I found a bad link or a date problem, I would jump into the HTML page and fix it. Of course that is when we had a small list of 400 titles. As our access grew to the 16,000+ journals in OhioLINK I was willing to give up the control. If you are using the Web Portal, you lose some control in how the results are displayed. This can be problematic when a user chooses to "Browse" through journal titles and they click on "J". Users would see, "Jou-Jou, Jou-Jou," as it tries to display navigation to all of the journals that start with "Journal of..." We called Serials Solutions about this and they created a work around which was better, but it is not ideal.

Browsing by title is cumbersome if you have large lists. It just seems like this takes quite a bit of time because they list quite a few journals on a page and their navigation within the chosen letter is not expanded enough.
This is the navigation that the user sees when they click on the letter J:

JAAPA : Official Jou... Journal of accountin... Journal of applied g... Journal of biomolecu... Journal of clinical ... Journal of contempor... Journal of economic ... Journal of evolution... Journal of Geophysic...

From the statistics we see that most of our users Browse for titles, so we would like to see some serious improvement in their browsing navigation.

You can search for titles of journals or the ISSN number. This is the easiest method to search but it can also be the most frustrating. If you search for complete title, you must include the "of" "and" "the" that are present in the title. All too often our users forget to include the "of" in the New England Journal of Medicine. Then they are amazed when they see no results. You must always explain to users to type the complete name. Serials Solutions does offer a search called, "Title Contains All Words" but our users have problems with that too.

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Conclusion:
All in all we absolutely love Serials Solutions and how it has allowed us to provide as close to possible one stop shopping to journal articles. Serials Solutions always seems to be adding to their product and are interested in library opinions. The cons I have mentioned are minor compared to the ease of which we can now manage thousands of journals. If you are a smaller library with a smaller amount of journals the pros may not outweigh the cons, especially if you like to maintain complete control over your ejournal list.