The authors recount experiences of the variety of problems and issues involved in providing access to electronic journals in a large academic library. The paper excludes concerns emanating from decisions to subscribe to aggregations such as those produced by vendors like EBSCO, but concentrates on scholarly journals ordered individually, or as part of a scholarly or scientific society package. Despite the number of years that publishers have been offering electronic journals, pricing policies are still fluid, and the problems of access encountered in the late 1990s still cause frustrating delays in provision of access to our academic staff and students. Questions on whether or not to use a subscription agent to assist in solving these problems are raised. There are no hard and fast rules, and no easy answers.