As someone who has been both a faculty member and a librarian, I have
found that the information provided by faculty surveys is worthless. You
may be fortunate enough to have a few faculty who actually can evaluate
the material objectively and from a sufficiently broad perspective; in my
20 yrs. of experience here with an exceptionally brilliant and perceptive
group of faculty in three different science departments, I have actually
known one and heard of another! (To be fair, I have also been able to
teach a few others.) Beware not just of faculty who say that everything is
important, but those who will be perfectly willing to drop almost
anything.

What I tell my faculty is that they determine 100% the titles we get; they
determine it by what they use and what they have their students use.
(Notice this is different from what they think they use, or what they say
the use, or what they think they ought to be using, or what they used when
they were in graduate school.)

I measure the use, and evaluate it in connection with cost, availability,
my knowledge of new and dying titles and of publishing developments. I
also need to know the direction of future research and teaching, and this
is where advice from them can come in. Be aware that you presumably want
to meet the needs of the users and departments who make less aggressive
demands as well as those who push you the hardest. I have seen many
faculty-determined collections that meet the needs of not merely the
faculty rather than the students, but of a few particular faculty only.
Come to think of it, that's why they make unreasonable requests--they have
experience that library funding is often distributed so as to at least
partially satisfy those who speak the loudest.

The measurements of use are: use in the library and circulation, if your
journals circulate; this is then reflected in large part use by the
faculty and students in citations in their papers, theses and papers. All
of this can be measured, and the techniques are well-known and reported in
the literature.

A knowledge of the literature in the subject fields is a useful help in
interpreting this data. Here you should be able to find faculty who can
help if you ask them the right questions, i.e., not should we buy x, but
are the articles in x of particularly high quality or usefulness. A
particularly useful question is, why is no one using x? They should also
be able to teach you the standards they use. Also take into account what
the users would use that you don't currently have, if it were available.
Yes, aside from the ill demand, that is hard to measure and is a suitable
place for judging by experience and insight.

I also find a useful control in what other similar libraries do,
especially ones I think are particularly skillful. This is also one
approach if you find yourself needing to make immediate decisions without
any actual use measurements at hand.

To what extent can you rely on journal packages? I have previously stated
very strongly my view that packages which supply the words of a journal
without the figures and the pagination are not equivalent to the journal.
Most faculty will not accept them for student papers, and indeed they
should not. Many databases find it convenient to say full text, when they
mean text in the most narrow possible sense.

To what extent document delivery can substitute is harder to specify. We
all use it and must use it for material out of our normal scope. The
problem is that most ill and document delivery scheme do not provide the
articles sufficiently easily and rapidly for many practical needs: they
work only for those people who need the article very badly, but not very
fast. Rapid document delivery is available, but is very expensive both in
copyright charges and staff time. You will find that if you provide it,
there will be a very high demand for it, thus increasing the cost.

I have experience at primarily teaching institutions as well as research
ones, and I think this approach is equally applicable anywhere, if you
properly interpret and measure "use." The users vary; the concept of
providing what the users need is always applicable.

 There is no solution except adequate library funding or a less expensive
way of publishing academic materials.

David Goodman,
Princeton University Biology Library
dgoodman@princeton.edu            609-258-3235

On Fri, 14 Jan 2000, Peter Washkevich wrote:

> Our library is currently facing drastic serials subscription reductions,
> due to costs we can no longer hope to keep up with.
>
> I'd like to know how other libraries have come up with strategies for
> deleting subscriptions.
>
> We've talked about a departmental survey, in hopes of identifying core
> journals.  In fact, we pulled out the last one, done around 5 years ago.
> Problem is, one department we looked at identified nearly all their
> journals as core titles!
>
> We've discussed using electronic resources that include full-text titles
> we subscribe to in hard copy, as replacement for the hard copy.  But what
> if the electronic title disappears from the online database?
>
> We've talked about going from department to department on campus, and just
> laying out the numbers, asking for suggestions for cuts.
>
> I'm sure other libraries are faced with this same old story...serials
> costs rising at a rate too fast for budgets to keep up with.  When cuts
> become a necessary reality, what strategies have others come up with to
> reduce costs, without compromising the collection's ability to support
> curriculum?
>
> Peter Washkevich / Marshall University
>  <washkevich@MARSHALL.EDU>