Update to my Electronic Journals Resource Directory

[Amity Horowitz]

> This reminded me of one of the items on our wish list -- has anyone
> attempted to catalog the periodical titles included in full-text services
> like Lexis-Nexis or FirstSearch and include those titles as at least
> temporary records in an OPAC?  If yes, how frequently do you update that
> information?
> 
> 
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Heather Whipple                        hwhippl1 at swarthmore.edu
> Humanities Librarian                        phone 610/328-8492
> Swarthmore College                            fax 610/328-7329
> 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081

We haven't added these titles to the OPAC, but I did create a database
(using MS Access) to store the lists of fulltext titles for the various
databases we use.  Some of the databases are available for endusers and
some can only be used by the librarians.  The database includes titles
from some of the databases in FirstSearch and SearchBank, and ProQuest
and also the journal list for ELibrary.  So far we've only used it by
printing out a long report for each branch.  The report lists each title
and the database(s) and date range for full text availability.  Although
this isn't nearly as useful as (accurate) info in the OPAC, it does
help.

As you expected, keeping it up to date is the big challenge.  It's been
several months since I set it up and I've only made a few updates since
then.  Originally I thought that I'd just regularly download the title
lists and compare them to the existing lists, but it turned out to be
more complicated than that.  Some of the lists required a good deal of
massaging to get them ready to compare with the master list I'd created.

Amity Horowitz				amity at erols.com
Reference Librarian/Web Designer
Fairfax County Public Library