I just had a visit from our Swets rep. He informed me of the usual what is new with Swets stuff, then he asked me what I would like to see Swets provide. The previous day I was wrangling with several electronic journals and of course the first question they ask is, "What is your customer number?" So I asked my Swets rep if they (Swets) could provide the customer numbers for every journal in my subscription.

As anybody who deals with electronic journals would know the customer number is VERY important. You can not easily activate online access without this number and whenever you contact them they require your customer number "to better serve you." Now something this important and this crucial to online access would be put some place somewhat secure or they would mail it to you in a separate letter. Noooooooo. This little booger is on the stupid mailing label that is either attached the journal itself or the packaging. So you have to hunt down the actual journal or its wrapper (that gets thrown in the trash most of the time) to activate online access.

Compared to large academic institutions we are a small library, but compared to medical/hospital libraries we are pretty large. Think about it would you like to hunt down approximately 800 titles (what we currently own in print) to get the customer number just to determine online access is available or to activate it. I don't think so.

So that is why I asked our Swets rep for Swets to include such information. He responded by saying that Swets has that information and that it is labeled as the Swets number. Well guess what he is wrong, the Swets number is not the journal customer number (I checked). Now again I ask you... Is it so hard for somebody like a subscription agent to have the customer numbers for the journals?!?!