Re: Society Survey UNLKH@UBVM.BITNET 14 Mar 1991 19:22 UTC
The questions which Ann raises in terms of the society specialty journals survey are interesting ones. First, I hope that she passes on to the society our sincere thanks that they have chosen this way of gaining input from their potential customers. Certainly, full-text on cd-rom is an interesting option for purchase. Should we assume that this would be a purchase, an ownership, of the disks, rather than a "lease"? Can we also assume that replacement of stolen or damaged disks would be low-cost (or maybe even free?) The only problems with scientific journals in computerized format is that of graphics. How would they translate from CD to paper? Mose of us have ink jet printers, not laser printers, on our cd-rom equipment (cost of laser printers is prohibitive unless you charge for pages copied). I doubt that ink jets would do this society's journals any justice. And, how would faculty respond to having to take downloaded files (I assume that the cd-rom would come with software allowing you to download pages or articles to disk in addition to retrieval software) to yet another facility to get laser prints (which they might also have to pay for)? In answer to question "a", the decision to purchase specialty journals in hard copy would depend on how articles in them are cited. Are articles going to carry duplicate information for citation purposes? If someone cites the page and issue in the specialty journal, how will that translate into the consolidated version? The nature of the subscriptions and their cost IS important. Is it much cheaper to get all the specialty journals than to subscribe to the cd-rom? Or vice-versa? Can you subscribe to only SOME of the specialty titles? In these days of increasing serials co sts, more and more libraries are considering the wisdom of continuing blanket subscriptions to society journals as one of the "givens" of collection development. Are the specialty journals so esoteric that you can afford to live without them? As to question (c), I'm tempted to ask "Are you kidding" when asked if I'd purchase individual titles in paper copy AND also subscribe to a cd-rom! But, then again, I'm trying to cut subscriptions in my science and engineering library by about $200,000 this year. In the other(d) category, I'd like to say that this sounds like a catalogers' and ILL librarians' nightmare (plural intentional because this will cause many people in many institutions many a night's sleep). Issues of paging, citations, continues and continued by notes, call numbers, etc. will need to be resolved. Thanks, Ann, for asking. I'm sorry to have responded with more questions than answers. Kate Herzog, Director, Science and Engineering Library, University of New York at Buffalo (unlkh@ubvm.bitnet)