eBrary eBooks – Understanding the ‘Document unavailable’ message

LLR’s subscription to eBooks on the eBrary platform is to a virtual ‘collection’ of several tens of thousands of eBook titles. Like other ‘aggregator’ collections the subscription guarantees access to the collection as it changes and evolves over the course of the subscription rather than to a fixed list of guaranteed titles. As publisher agreements with eBrary change, new titles are routinely added to the collection and some existing titles are withdrawn from it.

Once a month, eBrary publishes a list of the titles that have been added to, and withdrawn from, the collection over the course of the previous four weeks – sometimes the changes affect less than a dozen titles in total; at other times the changes involve a hundred items or more (out of an overall collection of 30,000+ titles). As these lists of changes are published, the eServices team adds catalogue records for additions to the eBrary collection to ALEPH, and deletes catalogue records for withdrawn eBrary titles.

As these updated lists are only published monthly by eBrary, and then require processing and loading/deleting on ALEPH by LLR, there will sometimes be brief periods when there are some eBrary catalogue records on ALEPH for titles that have been withdrawn by eBrary. In these cases, clicking on the link in the Library Catalogue will produce a ‘Document unavailable’ message (see sample illustration below). There may also be new eBrary titles now available in the collection for which individual catalogue records have yet to be added to ALEPH.

If you encounter any examples where a ‘Document unavailable’ response to an eBrary catalogue record is proving particularly problematic for customers, please provide the eServices team with the details and we will arrange to suppress the appearance of that record in the catalogue pending confirmation from eBrary of the title’s withdrawal from the collection. That record will be removed from the catalogue during the next eBrary record update; and any new records will be added.