|
Survey to monitor use of serials Don't reshelve those periodicals after you look at them in Bata Library! Leave them on a nearby table, next to the photocopier, in a study carrel. Then they can be counted. Beginning next month, a library employee will scour all surfaces on Bata Library's four floors searching for bound serials in the Library of Congress classification and all microform serials (journals or periodicals) in the Microforms Reading Room. They will record which volumes they find of all Trent's current academic subscriptions. They will do this twice a day until April and may repeat the exercise next year. It's a way of weeding out the weak and the useless as the world -- and Bata Library -- moves into the electronic information age. Nevertheless, says technical services librarian Marisa Scigliano, "we cannot dispense with traditional paper publications without evaluating their usefulness." Eighty to 90 per cent of serial use is in the library and therefore can't be gauged by looking at circulation stats. This survey will give a more accurate picture of how much serials are used and help academic departments cope with subscription costs that have risen as much as 15 per cent this year for serials that already cost hundreds of dollars, a weak dollar that inflates the price of foreign periodicals, and pressures to buy expensive electronic versions. The hard facts could lead to cancelled subscriptions, says Scigliano. "The bottom line is the library is moving away from paper subscriptions of low-use journals towards document delivery of specific articles." Seventy per cent of Bata Library's acquisition budget goes to academic departments to order their own literature. Escalating prices (Scigliano blames in part academic publishers who have monopolies on certain periodical literature) over the past 10 years have forced most to cancel some periodical subscriptions. "This has been a particularly bad year for Geography, Chemistry, Biology and Psychology," says Scigliano. In two years, for instance, the Journal of Fish Biology rose 40 per cent to $1,544 this year from $1,034 in 1995. Similarly, Hydrological Processes doubled in price to $1,367; Biogeochemistry jumped 50 per cent to $1,200 and Chemosphere more than 30 per cent to a whopping $3,156. |
Maintained by the Communications Department
Last updated: September 26, 1997