Responses to the following posting:
From: John Barnett <JBarnett_at_utsa.edu&g t;
I am new to the serials game, and the deeper I get into the matter,
the more questions I have (and, frankly, the more fun I have,too).
Our library, an academic library serving a university of approximately
18,000 students, has a number of subscriptions to digital journal
collections (e.g., IEEE Xplore, JSTOR, Project Muse, Wiley
InterScience, etc.). In addition, for some of the titles held, we
receive print issues. For example, IEEE sends "free" print issues
of their journals as part of our electronic subscription. In other
cases, we have discontinued our print subscriptions, if our licensing
agreements allow us to do so.
In another related situation, we have serials for which we need to
make retention decisions. In some cases, we will want to weed the
print issue in favor of microfilm/fiche.
In these circumstances, I would welcome hearing how other university
libraries are dealing with their print issues. We do no t have space
in the stacks or in storage to keep all of our print issues, nor do
we feel the need to, as we consider the electronic journal
collections and microforms as "permanent" holdings--well, at least,
as permanent as any library holdings, electronic or otherwise,
can be.
We have considered participating in the duplicates and exchanges
union as a way to share the embarrassment of riches that we have.
We have also considered selling off our print issues to J aeger or
USBE or other sources. However, does the cost and time it takes to
send these issues on to their new home justify the benefits we may
receive?
I haven't found much to go on so far in Library Literature. If
any of you have testimonials you'd like to make, I would welcome
hearing from you.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
John
John Barnett
Collection Development, UTSA Library
==#1
From: Susan Smith <ssmith_at_westga.edu>
We have put our JSTOR bound vol. on BACKServ, an exchange listserv.
About half were taken by academic institutions. Some were requested by
backfile vendors or individuals. According to our state laws &
regulations, we are not allowed to give to sell to vendors or
individuals. I have one staff member who does all microforms, binding,
replacement issues, etc. She adds some to BACKServ each week and ships
them out as they are requested. We ask for reimbursement of shipping
charges. AT the end of a month we put the remainder in recycling. It
moves along pretty well.
Susan A. Smith
Head of Acquisitions
Ingram Library
State University of West Georgia
Carrollton, GA 30118
==#2
From: "Linwood DeLong" <linwood.delong_at_uwinnipeg.ca>
We are dealing with these issues too. Our institution is smaller,
approx. 6,000 FTE. We are cancelling print subscriptions where
we have a "reliable" e-equivalent, such as Project Muse or JSTOR.
We also cancelled some of the print subscriptions
for journals held by EbscoHost and ProQuest, but I find that the
agreements that publishers have with these two aggregators are
rather transitory: here today and gone tomorrow.
We may have to take the position that we will simply rely on
interlibrary loan for back issues before a certain date, in the
event that we find that our e-subscription has lapsed and that
we no longer have print. i .e. discard the print, because of
space considerations, and assume that in many disciplines, journal
articles from the 1960s and 1970s are only infrequently requested.
(I realize that a research library could not take this position.)
We haven't worked out a dollar value per running foot of shelf
space, to work out the relative cost of keeping a print copy vs
relying on increased e-subscription costs. It's interesting to
try to decide whether it is cheaper to subscribe to JSTOR and
discard print, or cheaper just to keep the print.
We sometimes don't cancel print, if the print copy contains a
lot of important coloured ("colored" in the U.S. ?) illustrations,
charts, art reproductions, etc., because not everyone has access
to printers that can reproduce in colour.
I agree that this is a difficult issue with many ramifications.
Linwood DeLong
Collections Coordinator
University of Winnipeg Library
Winnipeg, MB
Canada R3B 2E9
==#3
From: Tom Izbicki <izbicki_at_jhu.edu>
Most of our older journals have gone to offsite shelving, & we are
considering sending the back files of any that we might cancel.
Tom Izbicki
==#4
From: Denise Johnson <johnson_at_hilltop.bradley.edu>
We've handled many of the same issues you discuss in your msg., so I
thought I'd write. We have an FTE, by the way, of 6000.
Over the last 2-3 years, we've reviewed, in faculty meetings, our
dead runs of journals (e.g. journals which have either ceased
publication or which we have cancelled). For many of the titles
examined, we decided to withdraw the remaining volumes, sometimes
after consultation with teaching faculty in the relevant areas.
Some of the criteria we used for keeping dead runs: we kept long
runs of titles with historical value if they were indexed in sources
such as Reader's Guide and International Periodicals Index., we also
kept titles of historical significance, even when we had only
short runs, if they reflected an important era of American History
from a unique viewpoint (e.g. I.F. Stone's Weekly), we kept titles
which had been subsumed by subsequent titles we now hold. That
still left us with thousands of bound volumes to dispose of. We
did send lists to a couple of OP Periodical vendors. We ended
up netting about $3,000 from the sale of the ones they wanted.
A student worker was detailed to do the packing, and the vendor
had a relationship with a shipper who picked them up, so the sale
of our items was somewhat cost-effective. We also offered volumes
to libraries in our area and in our catalog consortium. We had
no library takers.
We are currently considering dropping print and/or microfilm in
favor of electronic access to some titles. So far, we have
dropped only subscriptions to print indexes in favor of electronic
products, but we will probably be dropping some newspapers in
microfilm in the near future. We may also be weeding some long
runs of current journal titles in their retrospective volumes,
due to access via JSTOR, etc. This last is still under discussion.
I hope that helps. dj
Received on Thu Sep 20 2001 - 19:22:25 EDT