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• A Look at Librarianship through the Lens of an Academic Library Serials Review

  by Annette Day and Hilary Davis

  July 8, 2009
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  Image cour­tesy of Flickr mem­ber Elvie.R.

  Talk to any librar­ian or library ven­dor and you’ll hear the same thing – the global eco­nomic down­turn is hit­ting hard. Libraries every­where are tak­ing an axe to their col­lec­tions; libraries are cut­ting book bud­gets, can­cel­ing seri­als sub­scrip­tions, allow­ing insti­tu­tional mem­ber­ships to lapse, and let­ting go of data­bases. Libraries and their stake­hold­ers are hav­ing to make some really hard, real­is­tic deci­sions about how much they can do with­out, while still main­tain­ing ade­quate sup­port for learn­ing, research, and teach­ing. The expe­ri­ence of a seri­als and data­bases review– review­ing all con­tin­u­ing expense oblig­a­tions– can be a painful, trau­matic process for any library. But it can also give a library some tremen­dous insights into its col­lec­tion, its level of cred­i­bil­ity within its par­ent orga­ni­za­tion, and just how well-positioned it is to fully sup­port the needs of its con­stituents. A review can unveil some inter­est­ing issues in the busi­ness of librar­i­an­ship, pub­lish­ing, and schol­arly com­mu­ni­ca­tion – from the tools and skills nec­es­sary to make value judg­ments about a library col­lec­tion to the poten­tially fatal future of some seg­ments of the pub­lish­ing indus­try. In this arti­cle, we out­line the steps of a seri­als and data­bases review from the per­spec­tive of an aca­d­e­mic library and unpack some of the big issues and ques­tions that face our pro­fes­sion as sur­faced through the expe­ri­ence of a con­duct­ing a review.

  1. Iden­tify the Seri­als and Databases

  To suc­cess­fully under­take a seri­als review you of course need a list of every­thing to which your library sub­scribes, how much you pay for each ser­ial and data­base, and the dol­lar amount you have to cut to meet the bot­tom line. Wher­ever pos­si­ble you also want to gather data ele­ments that, com­bined with cost, cam­pus feed­back and librar­ian knowl­edge, will help you ascer­tain the value each title brings to your com­mu­nity. Some of the more com­mon data ele­ments librar­i­ans uti­lize in a review exer­cise are: ven­dor sup­plied usage sta­tis­tics, impact fac­tors, infor­ma­tion about jour­nals your con­stituents are pub­lish­ing in and cit­ing, and alter­na­tive access via data­bases that aggre­gate full-text jour­nal con­tent. This list of poten­tially use­ful col­lec­tion met­rics is cer­tainly not defin­i­tive but it rep­re­sents those data ele­ments that are heav­ily relied upon by most libraries (for more see the met­rics described by Guy Gugliotta).

  The above sounds a sim­ple propo­si­tion, but the ways in which libraries sub­scribe to jour­nals are not sim­ple. For instance, jour­nals and data­bases may be sub­scribed in a mul­ti­tude of ways: through a pack­age of journals/databases from a pub­lisher, on the basis of an insti­tu­tional mem­ber­ship, or through a con­sor­tial deal whereby access to a given resource is shared by all libraries in a con­sor­tium due to the fact that one of the mem­ber libraries sub­scribes to the jour­nal. Unfor­tu­nately, the tools avail­able to us to man­age and account for com­plex sub­scrip­tions don’t yet meet all of our needs. An ILS (Inte­grated Library Sys­tem) will likely work with the con­cept of an “order,” but an order doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily cor­re­late to jour­nal titles or other ways that jour­nals can be pur­chased such as pack­ages and mem­ber­ships. If an order is for a jour­nal pack­age, say the ACM Dig­i­tal Library, only one record with the asso­ci­ated pack­age cost may appear in your ILS. The order is, in real­ity, for each of the 30 jour­nals con­tained in that pack­age but the native ILS has dif­fi­culty with that con­cept. Gen­er­at­ing a com­pre­hen­sive list of sub­scribed jour­nal titles and their asso­ci­ated costs from an ILS is far from straight­for­ward, and in our expe­ri­ence no ILS is cur­rently set up out of the box to work that way. If you were to ask your Acqui­si­tions librar­ian, they would tell you that the issue goes even deeper – the way that seri­als agents and pub­lish­ers set up the billing struc­ture for libraries can dic­tate how libraries are able to describe the order and its related parts.

  Con­se­quently, a lot of larger libraries have turned to an ERM (Elec­tronic Resource Man­age­ment sys­tem) as a way to try to tackle some of the inad­e­qua­cies of today’s ILSs. The­o­ret­i­cally, an ERM helps libraries main­tain a run­ning inven­tory of jour­nals to which they pro­vide access (either paid or free), if they paid for them dur­ing the cur­rent fis­cal cycle, the cost paid (either as an insti­tu­tional mem­ber­ship, or as a sub­scrip­tion to a sin­gle title or a pack­age of titles) and the library’s rights to the con­tent for which they have paid (i.e., can the library claim per­pet­ual own­er­ship of the con­tent or is the library sim­ply leas­ing cur­rent access?). Many fac­tors have to be tri­an­gu­lated to rea­son­ably deter­mine if you’re get­ting good value for your sub­scrip­tion money. Hav­ing this infor­ma­tion col­lected in one place in prepa­ra­tion for a seri­als and data­bases review is crit­i­cal, espe­cially if your sub­scrip­tions have soared beyond 100 or so. How­ever, based on our own expe­ri­ence and talk­ing with other libraries, no ERM is truly posi­tioned to com­bine all of these pieces in a way that is effi­cient and accu­rate. A great deal of time and atten­tion is needed to han­dle extrac­tion of data, nor­mal­iz­ing the data (e.g., the con­cept of “usage” and “down­loads vs. accesses” is not applied con­sis­tently inter­nally or exter­nally by publishers/vendors), clean­ing up the data (e.g., com­pil­ing cost data from mul­ti­ple order records for thou­sands of sub­scrip­tions and vari­a­tions in how seri­als are pack­aged), and inter­pre­ta­tion of the data.

  The bot­tom line is that cur­rent ILS and ERM solu­tions are imper­fect tools for com­pre­hen­sively sup­port­ing a major seri­als and data­bases review to achieve can­cel­la­tions and save money. What is needed from these kinds of tools is a way to co-locate order infor­ma­tion with use infor­ma­tion and pro­vide a sys­tem to col­lect feed­back from a user com­mu­nity to help deter­mine the rel­a­tive value of jour­nals and data­bases when we have to make cuts to the collection.

  2. Com­mu­ni­cate with Users

  A major com­po­nent of a seri­als and data­bases review is com­mu­ni­cat­ing with your users why a review is nec­es­sary, lay­ing out how it will work, and mak­ing clear what kind of feed­back is needed from them. It might not be the eas­i­est dia­logue to have with your com­mu­nity, but it is a prime oppor­tu­nity to have hon­est, open con­ver­sa­tions that will edu­cate your patrons and address many of their com­monly held mis­con­cep­tions and anxieties.

  In order to make the best deci­sions on what resources to keep and what to can­cel libraries have to actively solicit feed­back from their com­mu­ni­ties. This is usu­ally done in a com­bi­na­tion of ways — meet­ings between librar­i­ans and fac­ulty, emails to cam­pus, and a web pres­ence designed to com­mu­ni­cate the rea­sons for the cuts and the mech­a­nisms for pro­vid­ing feed­back. Some exam­ples of web­sites cre­ated for this pur­pose are from North Car­olina State Uni­ver­sity Libraries,  and the Uni­ver­sity of Mary­land Libraries.

  

  NCSU Libraries Seri­als Review form

  Some libraries will ask for feed­back on a list of every sin­gle jour­nal and data­base to which they sub­scribe while oth­ers attempt to share only the con­tent that isn’t deemed a “no-brainer” to keep. While the idea of pro­vid­ing as much infor­ma­tion and data as pos­si­ble to your users can be com­pelling, it has its draw­backs. Is a data-driven approach the best method for get­ting feed­back from con­stituents? You want to bal­ance giv­ing your users enough infor­ma­tion to make informed deci­sions, but you don’t want to over­whelm them with infor­ma­tion that they either don’t care about or that takes lots of expla­na­tion. Jour­nal cost, sub­ject, usage sta­tis­tics, impact fac­tors, and the jour­nals in which your con­stituents are pub­lish­ing and cit­ing (sup­plied by the Local Jour­nal Uti­liza­tion Reports (LJUR) from Thom­son ISI) are all stan­dard met­rics that will likely res­onate with library patrons and that can eas­ily be con­veyed with each title on the list for review.

  What does it mean to “keep or can­cel” a jour­nal? A com­mon mis­con­cep­tion from patrons is that the print and online com­po­nents or for­mats of a jour­nal are “always” dis­tinct and that can­cel­ing one for­mat means that the other will still be avail­able. Of course, we know that this is not always the case as, often the cost of the print is tied to the online ver­sion (and vice versa). This is an oppor­tu­nity to dis­pel another com­mon mis­con­cep­tion about poten­tial cost sav­ing by going electronic-only (drop­ping the print and main­tain­ing only the elec­tronic for­mat of a jour­nal). Real­is­ti­cally libraries rarely see more than 5% sav­ings by drop­ping print sub­scrip­tions but many patrons (usu­ally fac­ulty) expect the sav­ings to be higher and are often star­tled that the cost of the jour­nal isn’t halved by remov­ing one for­mat. From the pub­lish­ers’ per­spec­tive the pro­duc­tion costs of pub­lish­ing jour­nals, regard­less of for­mat, play heav­ily into the prices that libraries pay, hence the min­i­mal savings.

  What about preser­va­tion for the long-term? One com­mon anx­i­ety that librar­i­ans still fre­quently meet is cen­tered on the loss of the print jour­nal. Most libraries have moved large chunks of their jour­nal col­lec­tions to elec­tronic only for­mats. The desk­top con­ve­nience pro­vided by the elec­tronic for­mat is expected by our patrons and the down­stream cost sav­ings that libraries can real­ize is ben­e­fi­cial. Patrons have embraced the elec­tronic for­mat, yet when asked about can­cel­ing print coun­ter­parts (if you still have them) many users are ret­i­cent. Some­times their con­cern is tied up in the tra­di­tional notion of the library as a large print archive where researchers can serendip­i­tously dis­cover con­tent by brows­ing in the stacks. In other cases, patrons are shocked that in the dig­i­tal world libraries haven’t done a straight swap from shelf space to server space. The fact that, in most cases, these elec­tronic mate­ri­als do not reside on a local server, but are main­tained on pub­lish­ers’ servers across the world makes it hard to con­vey the shifted con­cept of own­er­ship in the elec­tronic world. Libraries can nego­ti­ate for rights to own the elec­tronic con­tent just like it can own the phys­i­cal item sit­ting on the shelf, but if that con­tent resides on some­one else’s servers, some patrons, per­haps right­fully, are dis­trust­ing of a move away from the print world and fear­ful for how we can suc­cess­fully safe­guard these mate­ri­als for future gen­er­a­tions. With the eco­nomic cri­sis pro­vid­ing the final nail in most print jour­nal coffins, this is a great oppor­tu­nity to edu­cate your patrons about the con­cepts of archival and per­pet­ual rights, explain­ing what options are avail­able, such as LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) and Por­tico.

  What about other parts of a library sys­tem bud­get? A seri­als review brings to light the diverse ser­vices a library pro­vides and the breadth of the patron-base the library sup­ports. When asked to help make hard choices about cut­ting col­lec­tions, some patrons may look to other library-provided ser­vices and ques­tion why the library thinks those ser­vices are more impor­tant than their favorite book or jour­nal. Read­ing room ren­o­va­tions, com­puter equip­ment refreshes, and lap­top lend­ing are ser­vices that might seem periph­eral to one user but may be cen­tral to another user’s learn­ing and research expe­ri­ence. Any seri­als review will likely raise the thorny issue of how a library pri­or­i­tizes resources, and rec­on­cil­ing that bal­ance for some patrons will be dif­fi­cult. The intri­ca­cies of uni­ver­sity and aca­d­e­mic library bud­get­ing may not be what they want to hear about, but it is impor­tant to clearly explain, for instance, how a read­ing room ren­o­va­tion is sup­ported with a bud­get source that is dis­tinct and inde­pen­dent from the bud­get source that sup­ports jour­nals and databases.

  3. Eval­u­ate Feedback

  Once you’ve col­lected the com­mu­nity feed­back, the process of com­bin­ing all of the infor­ma­tion avail­able about each of the seri­als and data­bases begins. We’ve referred to jour­nal pack­age and con­sor­tial depen­den­cies already, but at this stage these issues truly make or break the deci­sion to can­cel a jour­nal or data­base. Does it make sense to dis­man­tle a pack­age of ten jour­nals sim­ply to be able to can­cel two titles if the cost of can­cel­ing those two titles doesn’t save more money than keep­ing the pack­age of ten intact? Con­sor­tial depen­den­cies are even more com­plex. Your library may have access to a title based on the fact that another library in your con­sor­tium pays for a set of jour­nals or data­bases, so the deci­sions made by that library to keep or can­cel resources could severely impact the abil­ity of their con­sor­tial part­ners to main­tain a col­lec­tion that best serves users. Often, large jour­nal pack­ages are nego­ti­ated by a con­sor­tium of libraries and the sav­ings that result from going in as a group can be com­pro­mised if one library decides to back out of the deal. The down­stream effects of can­cel­ing jour­nals and data­bases can build rapidly when these depen­den­cies are in place.

  Beyond pack­age and con­sor­tium depen­den­cies, the process of weigh­ing the vari­ety of met­rics asso­ci­ated with jour­nals and data­bases can be rather tricky. Not all jour­nals and data­bases pro­vide usage sta­tis­tics or impact fac­tors. There has been much writ­ten (e.g., Pikas, 2007; Davis and Price, 2005) about the reli­a­bil­ity of usage sta­tis­tics, even in light of exist­ing stan­dards for mea­sur­ing elec­tronic jour­nal use. So, how do you bal­ance the lack of met­rics for some resources with the need to deter­mine value of the resource to your com­mu­nity? To what extent do you trust usage sta­tis­tics when they do exist (this might be a whole arti­cle in it’s own right)?

  These are just a few of the tricky issues that must be weighed when eval­u­at­ing feed­back and com­bin­ing it with the data you may have. The bot­tom line is that a seri­als and data­bases review can­not and should not be entirely data-driven. The pres­ence of data for some resources and the absence of data for other resources needs to be care­fully weighed with the advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages of depen­den­cies as well as the librar­i­ans’ exper­tise and knowl­edge about the research, teach­ing and learn­ing needs of com­mu­nity. This is the value that col­lec­tion man­age­ment and acqui­si­tions librar­i­ans bring to the table dur­ing crit­i­cal bud­get cuts.

  4. Decision-Making — What to can­cel and what to keep?

  Ana­lyz­ing the feed­back will hope­fully have given you a clear idea of any “dead wood” that may be float­ing in your col­lec­tion. If you are extremely lucky then you may be able to stop there, but the real­i­ties of today’s eco­nomic cli­mate forces libraries to cut to lay­ers far below the “dead wood.” Tack­ling these deep cuts is truly painful, and at the final stage of the seri­als review requires the impos­si­ble task of bal­anc­ing the cam­pus feed­back with your bud­get reduc­tion tar­get. You need to make the best deci­sions to min­i­mize the impact of the col­lec­tions cuts on teach­ing and research, pre­serve a bal­ance between dif­fer­ent sub­ject dis­ci­plines and user groups, and refrain from stran­gling col­lec­tions flex­i­bil­ity and growth for years to come. Really sim­ple, right?!!

  For most libraries, the strate­gies used to deal with col­lec­tions cuts focus on some com­bi­na­tion of cut­ting seri­als, reduc­ing the mono­graph bud­get, going online-only (if you haven’t already), cut­ting stand­ing orders, reduc­ing the bind­ing bud­get, and can­cel­ing data­bases. It is extremely tempt­ing to shift the heavy lift­ing of the cuts to the mono­graph bud­get and shield the con­tin­u­ing resources from the cuts. A year or two of buy­ing con­sid­er­ably fewer mono­graphs sounds man­age­able and will likely have less imme­di­ate impact. How­ever, unless your bud­get cut is a one-time rever­sion and every­thing will get back to nor­mal next year, then be very cau­tious in hit­ting your mono­graph bud­get dis­pro­por­tion­ately from other col­lec­tion areas. Most aca­d­e­mic libraries prob­a­bly have between 75% to 98% of their col­lec­tions bud­gets tied up in con­tin­u­ing resources. The big­ger this pro­por­tion the more vul­ner­a­ble your bud­get is to infla­tion. Seri­als infla­tion is on aver­age about 8% a year, while mono­graph infla­tion is much lower. The cush­ion pro­vided by cut­ting the mono­graph bud­get will be eaten away quickly, and you will again be faced with cut­ting con­tin­u­ing resources just to keep infla­tion at bay. The act of build­ing a col­lec­tion quickly reaches the stage where it is one in, one out — noth­ing new can be added unless some­thing is can­celed. The col­lec­tion can­not grow or be nim­ble enough to respond to new cam­pus ini­tia­tives, it can only remain sta­tic. Keep­ing a bal­ance between seri­als and mono­graphs is crit­i­cal so that col­lec­tions breadth, flex­i­bil­ity and growth are not lost to com­bat­ing infla­tion­ary increases.

  A Few Last­ing Implications

  It will be hard to recover from sub­stan­tial cuts for con­sec­u­tive years, and the impact will be felt for years to come as gaps in col­lec­tions begin to appear. As col­lec­tions bud­gets con­tinue to dimin­ish leav­ing ever-widening gaps in col­lec­tions that can­not be filled ret­ro­spec­tively with­out a large influx of money, libraries may well begin to step away from the notion of broad and com­pre­hen­sive research col­lec­tions. Access to mate­ri­als at the point of need will become the main focus with patron-driven col­lect­ing or access mod­els becom­ing pri­mary strate­gies. Take a look at the Taiga4 state­ment:

  “Within the next 5 years col­lec­tion devel­op­ment as we now know it will cease to exist as selec­tion of library mate­ri­als will be entirely patron-driven. Own­er­ship of mate­ri­als will be lim­ited to what is actively used. The only col­lec­tion devel­op­ment activ­i­ties involv­ing librar­i­ans will be com­pe­ti­tion over spe­cial col­lec­tions and archives.”

  This state­ment may at first seem out­landish, but has strong foun­da­tions in what we see hap­pen­ing now. With col­lec­tions cuts, Inter­li­brary Loan (ILL) is becom­ing a key ser­vice for every library, ILL is the ulti­mate on-demand ser­vice. We also see libraries inves­ti­gat­ing and invest­ing in user-driven col­lec­tion mod­els for their mono­graph acqui­si­tions. These mod­els are seen mainly in the e-book land­scape with plat­forms such as EBL and MyiLi­brary work­ing with libraries to offer own­er­ship com­bined with on-demand col­lec­tion build­ing mod­els. Other libraries are work­ing to include print books into their on-demand col­lect­ing (Spitz­form and Sen­nyey, 2007).

  All of these devel­op­ments will pro­duce some major changes in the pub­lish­ing indus­try and per­haps ulti­mately in schol­arly com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Libraries have been the main mar­ket for high level research mono­graphs and jour­nals over the years, but that mar­ket has been shrink­ing and will no doubt con­tinue to dimin­ish in the future. The large pub­lish­ers will find some way to adapt, but the small pub­lish­ers may not. Small pub­lish­ers don’t have the rev­enues to “retool” their prod­ucts and pric­ing options to change with the times. Some are still unable to pro­vide stan­dard­ized usage sta­tis­tics (if any), and still oth­ers haven’t made the move to pro­duce their jour­nals electronically.

  Other impacts of a seri­als review are cap­tured in all of the back­end work of a library’s tech­ni­cal ser­vices team (acqui­si­tions, meta­data, and cat­a­loging) and the work they con­duct with the seri­als agents and pub­lish­ers. Jour­nal can­cel­la­tions and con­ver­sions to elec­tronic –only for­mat will cer­tainly imply work down the road to edit and update cat­a­log records. Sub­scrip­tion can­cel­la­tions may also result in reduced dis­counts with sub­scrip­tion agents as your spend­ing decreases. As a con­se­quence, rene­go­ti­a­tion of ser­vice agree­ments with seri­als agents and even new license agree­ments with pub­lish­ers will be likely. The work required to act on the deci­sions made as a result of a seri­als review can insti­gate a great deal of costs in terms of time and staff to actu­ally make the changes a reality.

  The impact of sub­stan­tial col­lec­tions cuts across a large num­ber of aca­d­e­mic insti­tu­tions will be felt imme­di­ately by the schol­arly pub­lish­ing indus­try. Longer-term impli­ca­tions for how research col­lec­tions are built and the nature of schol­arly com­mu­ni­ca­tion are unclear. Many pos­si­ble out­comes exist and libraries need to take a lead role in shap­ing their futures so that they still remain cen­tral to the learn­ing, teach­ing and research needs of their constituencies.

  Many thanks to our review­ers who helped shape this arti­cle:  Derik Bad­man (ItLwtLP), Kris­ten Blake (NCSU), Maria Collins (NCSU), Emily Ford (ItLwtLP), and Greg Raschke (NCSU).

  References/Further Read­ing:

  • Davis, Philip M. and Jason S. Price. 2005. “eJour­nal inter­face can influ­ence usage sta­tis­tics: Impli­ca­tions for libraries, pub­lish­ers, and Project COUNTER.” Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Soci­ety for Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence and Tech­nol­ogy, v. 57, no. 9: 1243 – 1248.
  • Gugliotta, Guy. 2009. “The Genius Index: One Scientist’s Cru­sade to Rewrite Rep­u­ta­tion Rules.” Wired Mag­a­zine: http://​www​.wired​.com/​c​u​l​t​u​r​e​/​g​e​e​k​i​p​e​d​i​a​/​m​a​g​a​z​i​n​e​/17 – 06/mf_impactfactor?currentPage=all
  • LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe): http://​www​.lockss​.org/
  • Pikas, Christina. 2007. “It’s about trust, reli­a­bil­ity, accu­racy…” Christina’s LIS Rant: http://​christi​nasli​braryrant​.blogspot​.com/​2​0​0​7​/​0​3​/​i​t​s​-​a​b​o​u​t​-​t​r​u​s​t​-​r​e​l​i​a​b​i​l​i​t​y​-​a​c​c​u​r​a​c​y​.​h​tml
  • Por­tico (A Dig­i­tal Preser­va­tion and Elec­tronic Archiv­ing Ser­vice): http://​www​.por​tico​.org/
  • Project COUNTER (Count­ing Online Usage of Net­work­ing Elec­tronic Resources): http://​www​.pro​ject​counter​.org/
  • Spitz­form, Peter and Pon­gracz Sen­nyey. 2007. “A vision for the future of aca­d­e­mic library col­lec­tions.” The Inter­na­tional Jour­nal of the Book, v. 4, no. 4: 185 – 190.
  • Taiga Forum. 2009. “Provoca­tive State­ments (after the meet­ing).” Taiga 4: http://​www​.taigafo​rum​.org/​d​o​c​u​m​e​n​t​s​/​T​a​iga 4 State­ments After.pdf

  You might also be inter­ested in:

  • A Look at Reces­sions and their Impact on Librarianship
  • Not Just Another Pretty Picture
  • All I want for 2010
  • Get­ting to Know You
  • A Con­ver­sa­tion with Kristin Antelman
  Tags: journal cancellations, serials review

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6 Comments

• Libology Blog » Choosing and Choices – Librarianship and Serials says:

  July 8, 2009 at 12:13 pm

  […] A Look at Librar­i­an­ship through the Lens of an Aca­d­e­mic Library Seri­als Review is a post from In the Library with a Lead Pipe.  It is not only a great exam­i­na­tion of the options avail­able, with their assorted ben­e­fits and risks, when decid­ing which ser­ial sub­scrip­tions to keep/cancel, but it is an exam­i­na­tion of what librar­i­an­ship brings to the process of main­tain­ing a collection. […]

  Reply
• Joan Perlman says:

  July 9, 2009 at 10:56 pm

  I totally agree. The most dif­fi­cult aspect is get­ting instruc­tors to respond in a timely fashion.

  Reply
• links for 2009-07-10 « Lawrence Tech Library says:

  July 10, 2009 at 7:47 am

  […] A Look at Librar­i­an­ship through the Lens of an Aca­d­e­mic Library Seri­als Review | In the Library with… (tags: libraries seri­als can­celling downsizing) […]

  Reply
• Hilary says:

  July 10, 2009 at 8:58 am

  @ Joan: Thanks for your com­ment. We broad­cast the mes­sage about the seri­als review a num­ber of ways — through our ded­i­cated library rep­re­sen­ta­tives from each aca­d­e­mic depart­ment, through our Uni­ver­sity Library Com­mit­tee, through the cam­pus news­pa­per, let­ters from our Library Direc­tor to each of the Dept Chairs, etc. Lever­ag­ing exist­ing con­tacts and empha­siz­ing the need to make deci­sions col­lab­o­ra­tively with the cam­pus com­mu­nity is key, and in our expe­ri­ence, seems to work fairly well. What strate­gies have you used to get your users to pro­vide feed­back in a timely fashion?

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• why is serials recordkeeping so problematic? « Across Divided Networks says:

  July 12, 2009 at 8:44 am

  […] in Uncat­e­go­rized at 9:44 am by Androm­eda I’ve been read­ing this post, from the charm­ingly named In the Library with the Lead […]

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• Interesting Post from In the Library with the Leap Pipe « What Now? says:

  July 13, 2009 at 9:29 am

  […] by oeli­brar­ian on July 13, 2009 I read this arti­cle this morn­ing.  In my for­mer job I man­aged a seri­als col­lec­tion so really noth­ing in the […]

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