eJournal Availability Service

Another tool developed by the IDS Project is the eJournal Availability Service. The inability to determine accurate holdings and licensing information for electronic journals is a serious obstacle to effective resource sharing—especially as more libraries replace their print subscriptions with electronic subscriptions. In the case of the IDS Project, it was determined that 66% of article requests could be filled within the Project if such licensing and holdings information were available. This spurred the creation of the eJournal Availability Service.

The electronic journal holdings data for each member library is gathered biweekly from Serials Solutions. This is combined with licensing information that is kept up to date by a team of librarians. The result is a union catalog of holdings and licensing information that can be searched using ILLiad’s Z39.50 Search (Z Search) function. More information on the licensing research process is available here.

Borrowing staff can use that information to prioritize libraries that can lend a journal electronically, and lending staff can use it to speed up delivery by identifying from which electronic journals they are allowed to lend.