Posts tagged with 'Subscription Agents'

Knowledgebase Support from Subscription Agents

jemery March 22nd, 2007

[JE]: Hi Dan,

How are subscription agents helping libraries in maintaining accurate and precise knowledgebases?

[DT]:

Subscription agents like EBSCO have been in routine contact with over
14,000 publishers in the print world and built a strong database of ordering and payment information as well as limited electronic metadata. From the rapid conversion of our academic business from print to an electronic component, which now involves 72% of our academic orders, subscription agents have totally reengineered their title file or acquisitions and service knowledge base into a real time e-journal bibliographic tool that have moved a traditional ordering system into a bibliographic tool with new data elements to enable libraries to access and better manage their e-collections. We have reengineered our databases, expanded our staff, improved the level of staff to support this effort, instituted training for e-journal management and also are applying Web searching techniques to go out and collect data from publishers web sites.

Now that we have expanded our business line to include an A to Z
service and our Link resolver, there is a constant demand for current updated information. These new products have forever changed our data collection operation as this recent requirement has placed a high priority on obtaining and maintaining our knowledge base. We have added a dedicated team of professionals whose full time job it is to maintain the knowledgebase which builds on our traditional ordering and payment function. We get data directly from the publishers, we mine the data with our spiders crawling around publisher sites, and we collect data from our 32 offices as publishers announce changes to their data.

Maintaining a high quality knowledgebase is part of our strategic
mission in support of e-journal access and management and we are constantly looking for ways to keep that critical data up to date. So far we have made considerable progress in meeting this goal. Our knowledgebase gets better and stronger every day.

Dan Tonkery
Vice President, Director of Business Development
EBSCO Information Services

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