Providing and Maintaining Access to Electronic Serials: Consortium and Member University Library’s Perspectives

Abstract

Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) is a consortium of Ontario’s twenty-one university libraries. Scholars Portal E-journals (SP E-Journals) is an OCUL-sponsored digital repository containing over 45 million full text scholarly articles drawn from 19,000 journals covering every academic discipline. SP E-Journals exports its holdings to various knowledge bases including SFX. Scholars Portal (SP), OCUL’s shared technology infrastructure provider, maintains a central SFX instance for member libraries’ content subscribed via OCUL. The University of Windsor’s library is an OCUL member library that, until recently, used SFX as its Open Uniform Resource Locator link resolver for OCUL and local subscription content. This study will examine the work flow and problems encountered in maintaining central and local SFX instances, as well as discuss the advantages and challenges of providing and maintaining access to electronic serials at the consortium and member library levels.