Automatically Adjusting for the Embargo Period for Resources

Subscriptions to licensed content often stipulate an embargo period on newly-published material. During the embargo period, access to the content is prevented. For example, a journal might have a 30 day embargo period, meaning that the July issue is not available online until August.

WebBridge does not display links to resources during their embargo period.

NOTE

WebBridge assumes incomplete dates in OpenURLs to be January 1, (year). This can result in the display of resource links for issues that are still affected by an embargo period. However, the target resource itself does not display during the embargo period.

For example, if the WebBridge server receives an OpenURL request containing only "2007," the server assumes that the complete date is "January 1, 2007" and calculates the embargo period based on January 1, 2007. For a subscription with a 30-day embargo period, WebBridge would display the link to any issue published in 2007 after January 31st. Depending upon the actual month that the OpenURL is received, some or all of these issues might not be available due to embargo restrictions.

To account for the embargo period on a resource, WebBridge automatically adjusts the:

display of the LIB HAS end date
Match Date data tests

During the embargo period:

resources are not included in the LIB HAS field
if your library has acquired the Electronic Resources Management (ERM) product, resources are not included in WebPAC full record display's LIB HAS field
resources fail Match Date data tests

The embargo period is provided by the vendor in coverage data. The embargo period is at the title detail level of the coverage data (i.e., each serial has its own embargo period). The value of the embargo period is not at the provider level (i.e., serials from the same provider can have different embargo periods). An example of a coverage data entry containing embargo data is:

In this coverage data entry example, "3 Months" is the embargo period.

NOTE

The coverage data entry example is a single line in the coverage data file. For display purposes, it might appear as multiple lines here.

To use embargo periods:

Edit the coverage data text file.

Add the EMBARGO token to the configuration entry. For example:

TITLE|ISSN|START_DATE|END_DATE|PROVIDER|URL|EMBARGO
Edit the Coverage Spreadsheet Conversion Rules.
1. In the heading conversion section, make the EMBARGO token valid by adding conversion values. For example, if the providers use Embargo and EMBARGO as the heading of the embargo column in the coverage data, enter the following in the heading conversion section:
  fields|Embargo |EMBARGO
  fields|EMBARGO |EMBARGO
2. At the end of the Coverage Spreadsheet Conversion Rules, add an Embargo value conversion section that provides conversions for the common textual embargo statements. For example, "3 months" must be converted to "90" in the Embargo value conversion section. An example of a typical Embargo value conversion section is:
  
  #-----------------------------------------#
  #Embargo value conversion
  #-----------------------------------------#
  embargo|3 months|90
  embargo|3 Months|90
  embargo|Two Weeks|14
  embargo|1 Day|1
  embargo|Two and a half Years|912

When coverage data containing embargo values are loaded in the coverage database, embargo periods are effective immediately.

fields\|Embargo		\|EMBARGO
fields\|EMBARGO		\|EMBARGO