September 2008
Q: The eJournals list says [The Journal of Combustion Science] is available full text back to 1957 (see image) but when I go there the full text only starts with June 1995.

Q: There is an article in the Journal of Water Research that is not available online through Cornell. I get the message: “This article is not included in your organization’s subscription.” Is that normal?

Q: I am having trouble downloading a paper online from Journal of Thermal Analysis and Calorimetry. Is the paper available online?

These are just a few of these type of questions we’ve gotten over the past month or so here at Engineering. In each case, the problem seems to trace back to ScienceDirect journals. Specifically, there seems to be a descrepancy between what the eJournals listing in our catalog says about the depth of our backfile access and what access we actually are able to get in the form of full-text, PDF access. Most irritatingly, people are able to get as far as the expandable menu with the backfiles and then into the abstracts and citations before they discover they can’t get the full-text. That is, they get the ‘green screen of subscription-death’ where Elsevier tells them ‘Your institution does not have subscription access to this issue, please contact your library administrator…’ etc, etc.

We’ve forwarded each of these questions on to libit-l and have learned that the problem is in the catalog: We genuinely do not have subscription access to these backfiles and the catalog, through an updating error, should not be saying that we do. When this situation will be corrected, we are not sure.

In some cases, we’ve been able to direct people to paper subscriptions held elsewhere on campus. In others, we’ve simply had to recommend they use interlibrary loan.