Re: Are Journals in JSTOR Current Serials? Pennington, Buddy D. 23 Aug 2007 14:21 UTC
Hi all, I've been doing these for a few years now and keep wrestling with a number of items. I'd like to get a sense of how others are handling these items since the statistics don't do much good if folks are not counting things consistently. Any guidance or help would be much appreciated! 1. How to identify "current" titles in collections. We could fairly easily go through JSTOR and Project MUSE and identify the current titles. However, we also have ACM Digital Library (411 titles), American Chemical Society (35 titles), IEEE (3,976 titles), SpringerLINK (1,297 titles), and Wiley (560 titles). We are also very close to getting ScienceDirect Freedom Collection (1,839). With such a large number of titles, it is impractical for us to sift through to find the current and noncurrent titles. We have been counting all titles as current titles for the ALS statistics. 2. Duplication. There is also the issue of duplication, though this is not a large one if you are not including titles in databases. However, you could still have duplication if you subscribe to a title that is also available in JSTOR, etc. Do folks take the time to dedupe or do you count them as separate titles? We have been using Serials Solutions to dedupe when we can. 3. Titles in databases? Are people including titles found in databases like Academic Search Premier? You can read the definition as pointing to publisher collections (those generally considered complete, stable FT versus the instability we often find in databases), but does not explicitly prohibit database titles. If you count them, then the issue in #1 really scales up to unrealistic levels. And if you don't count them then aren't we excluding a pretty big part of our collection that attracts a huge percentage of our serials usage? Again, any help with this would be very useful. We do the best we can but I don't feel like we should be spending huge amounts of staff time trying to be as accurate as possible when we do not have clear definitions of what to include and not include. How can you compare current serial titles if library A is including FT databases while library B is not or if Library A counts all JSTOR titles as current while Library B excludes the entire collection? Buddy Pennington Serial Acquisitions Librarian University of Missouri - Kansas City University Libraries 800 East 51st Street Kansas City, MO 64110 816-235-1548 816-333-5584 (fax) penningtonb@umkc.edu -----Original Message----- From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum [mailto:SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU] On Behalf Of Patricia Thompson Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2007 5:11 PM To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU Subject: Re: [SERIALST] Are Journals in JSTOR Current Serials? We do. But only the current ones. Some are not current. There are different collections within JSTOR and depending on which ones you have subscribed to, you would have different numbers of titles. We regard these as online subscriptions to individual journal titles. Same with Project Muse. Pat Thompson At 04:18 PM 8/22/2007, you wrote: >Line 26 of the Academic Libraries Survey asks for the number of >current serial titles held at the end of the Fiscal Year. The >instructions for line 26 read: > >Part D - Library Collections >Current serial titles (line 26) - Report the total number of titles >in all formats. If the title comes in >both paper and electronic form, count it twice. Count each >individual title if it is received as part >of a publisher's package. Include paper and microfilm government >documents issued serially if >they are accessible through the library's catalog. Report indexing >and abstracting services that >may contain full-text in line 27. > >Do any libraries count JSTOR journals as current serial titles? > >Dennis Gibbons >Collection Development Librarian >Texas Christian University Phone: 817-257-7312 >TCU Box 298400 Fax: 817-257-7282 >Fort Worth, TX 76129 E-mail: d.gibbons@tcu.edu Patricia Thompson Assistant University Librarian for Resource Management Services Jessie Ball duPont Library The University of the South Sewanee, TN 37383 Phone: 931-598-1657 Email: pthompso@sewanee.edu