The session enjoyed the largest attendance ever, with academic librarians and vendors in the group, with academic librarians and vendors in the group. Librarians presented problems and success stories and made suggestions for improvements to products. New product and change announcement literature often is sent only to the library acquisitions units that deal with subscriptions but does not reach those in other areas who need to know in a timely manner. The suggestion was made that publishers and vendors develop e-mail lists of public service librarians who need to receive announcements of changes and new product feature announcements. Slow server response Products delivered via the Internet can become unusable when vendors' servers are overloaded, regional or campus network traffic is heavy, or other traffic demand problems arise.
Some vendors offer a solution in the form of establishing dedicated lines for their services.
Another suggested solution is using Java-based interfaces to send compressed pages. Some library users and librarians report frustration with free trial period services. Apparently many users miss the notification that they are using a time limited trial service and then suddenly miss it when no longer available, especially in cases of very short or very long duration trial periods. One suggestion was to only allow librarians access to trials to evaluate products and only make them available to users as subscribed products that will not go away. Many smaller academic libraries can not afford both print and electronic versions of materials and presently purchase only print.