----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Peter,

I was in charge of acquisitions and web resources at Seattle University for
the last four years.  Here are some opinions I formed based on my
experience.

>1) Do you subscribe to your periodical indexes on Internet through a)
>your vendor or  b)directly from the publisher?  Could you give a reason
>for your choice?

I preferred to subscribe to online indexes directly with the publisher.  I
found that, for online services, dealing with a serials vendor added too
many layers of contacts when there was a problem to resolve.  Also, I rely
most heavily on my serials vendors for billing and claiming and that was
never a problem for me with online services (just lucky I guess).  For some
electronic journals, I was required to go through a vendor.  In such cases I
just did what I had to do.

>
>2) Do you establish IP authentication directly with  a) your
>vendor or b)
>your publisher?

I have done it both ways.  Whether you subscribe to, or license, the service
through a vendor or publisher, the IP address authentication ultimately has
to reach the *technical support staff* for the service.  I preferred to
submit this information directly to the publisher rather than rely on the
serials vendor to forward my information.  Even if I did submit the IP
addresses to the vendor, I always followed up by submitting them to the
publisher's tech support dept.

Someone, from either library or ITS staff, will need to serve as a contact
to the tech support dept. for each online service.  The tech support dept.
will need to be contacted whenever there is a change in your local IP
address or when there is a problem with your connection. I think it helps to
have someone from the library doing this but it can work for ITS to handle
it if the two depts. keep close communication.

>
>3) Is the filtering or scripting access by IP address done by  a) your
>vendor or b)the publisher's technical support team  or c) your
>local ITS
>Dept.?

This will vary from product to product and from publisher to publisher.  For
most products, to set up IP authentication, you just send your IP address,
or range of IP addresses, to the publisher or vendor and that's all it
takes.  However, you will have to get the IP addresses from your ITS dept.
At that point ITS can determine the correct IP addresses to use based on
your local configuration -- whether you're behind a firewall, or whatever.

I must specify that simple IP address authentication will provide you with
access for computers *on your museum network only*.  In other words, this
set-up does not allow off-site access to the service.  Providing access to
remote users gets into other methods of authentication such as passwords and
the use of proxy servers.  It sounds like this will be ok for you since you
want to provide on-site access.


From my experience, there is little chance of standardizing your set-up
process for all online services.  Whether you contract through a vendor or
the publisher, the publisher is the one who provides the connection and so
determines which forms of user authentication they will provide and *how*
they will provide it.  To deal with this, I keep complete records on each
service provider as to what methods of authentication they provide, which
method we use, how we connect to them (web, telnet, etc.) how to contact
their technical support staff, our account number(s), and anything else
necessary to capture the details of connecting to that service. I agree with
you. The process is not as simple as it seems!

I hope this helps.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hollis Near
Director, Library Services
Cornish College of the Arts
710 East Roy Street
Seattle, WA 98102

phone     206-726-5040
fax       206-726-5055
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~