We thought we would ring-in the new year with a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the work required to bring over 76,000 full-text journals and hundreds of online databases to the Middlebury community. Both the end, and the beginning, of each year are the busiest for those of us maintaining library collections online and off, in print.
Most of our efforts from September into early November go toward making sure our subscriptions, for both print and online journals, continue uninterrupted from one year to the next. Of the nearly 2,000 subscriptions we have, there are always a few that somehow fail to get renewed despite our best efforts. For example, we might discover in March that we have not received any recent issues of Veja, a weekly magazine published in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Occasionally, we can fill the gaps of a lapsed subscription, but not always.
There is usually a mountain of mail awaiting us in the new year: books, newspapers, magazines, and journals from all over the world and bills for these books, newspapers, and magazines from around the world. If we spend the last few days of the previous year ensuring access to our library collections after December 31st, we spend the first few days of the new year digging ourselves out of the mail room, looking for those lost issues from the previous year and for bills to pay.
Especially in the new year, but any other time too, please let us know if you cannot find something online or in print that you know was there before. Our email: eaccess-admin@middlebury.edu. Happy new year!