Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Maze of the eJournal

In both places I've worked recently, access to electronic resources is way more complex than it needs to  be. There's always more than one search system, and each system generally returns more than one way to access the journal, many of which are redundant (e.g. EBSCO provides 2003-2006 but PsycArticles provides 1982-2012).

It seems like it really shouldn't be that difficult to just provide a single text box entry at any given institution. You copy and paste the reference you have from a paper of WoS search into that box, and the system takes you straight to the full text, if your university has access to it, and takes you to an Inter-Library Loans page if it doesn't [Or, alternatively, move to Open Access journals, and let Google take care of it -- but that's a whole other topic...]

If anyone does have that experience, let me know. Similarly, if your experience is as maze-like as mine, feel free to use this as a forum to moan :-)

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