This morning we had a call from a patron looking for e-journals using the Journals catalog in MNCAT. She was looking up a journal she knew we had electronic access to (American Journal of Epidemiology). However, the MNCAT record listed the paper holding but did not have the link for the e-journal. We tried with a few other journal titles, using both the full MNCAT and the Journals catalog, and the same thing happened - paper holdings but no e-journal link.
I called Janet Arth, and she said that phenomenon is caused by the monthly Aleph update - something about a process that deletes the current links and puts in new ones, so we happened to catch it between those two steps. It's now almost 4 hours since we first noticed this situation and there are still no e-journal links, but apparently this is normal.
You can still access the e-journals by using the e-journals database, even when the links don't appear in MNCAT. So, if you go into MNCAT and notice that all the e-journal links are gone, don't panic - use the e-journals database, and the links will be back in MNCAT soon.
Let me know if you have questions. Thanks!
Liz
Posted by biomedref at May 23, 2006 11:24 AM