Re: Faculty Participation in Collections (Hannah King) Ann Ercelawn 13 Jun 1994 13:23 UTC
Date: Sun, 12 Jun 1994 19:26:55 -0500 From: Hannah King <KINGH@SNYSYRV1.BITNET> Subject: RE: Faculty Participation in Collections (Sharon Murphy) I thought others might want to know about how various libraries have involved faculty in cancelation decisons. My director (Sue Murray) and I developed an evaluation form for each title on our cancelation list. The titles earned their place on the list by being used less than 6 times for 3 years or more out of 5. Faculty responded fairly well. Couldn't get anyone to evaluate the microbiology titles or the immunology titles. And the process took FOREVER, because I had to provide a lot of information we used in our own evaluation for each faculty evaluator. Quite a few ignored the evaluation questions included in the form and just wrote in their evaluations with little justification. I'm not sure I would repeat the process without substantially modifying the form. Some elements included in our form: Bibliographic information Holdigns Indexing Local and regional holdings Cost Re-shelving statistics for bound volumes Signatures on current issue survey cards Impact factor for past several years as a whole and rank in subject category (from Journal Citation Reports) Editor, society sponsor if any We asked faculty to rate the quality of the content using at least 4 issues. We asked them to rate according to the Council of (not sure of the correct name and am at home so can't look it up) Scientific Journals Editors criteria" structured abstract? accurate statisitcal analysis? conclusions clearly based on evidence discussed in text? an other stuff? We asked them to check currency of references, quality of illustrations, and topic relevance. Then we asked them to rate the journal: 1. low qualtiy -- cancel 2. average -- cancel ILL ok 3. good -- cancel only if necessary 4. excellent -- keep Oh, we also asked them to identify the appropriate audience for the journal at our university: students, grad students, faculty, clinical faculty, research faculty. As I said before, many did not answer our questions but we received a number a sufficient number, of returns recommending cancelation. We avoided canceling those titles strongly supported by faculty. We did receive a few complaints ("Why didn't you ask ME to evaluate that journal, I would have told you to keep it!) Hannah King SUNY HSC Library at Syracuse kingh@vax.cs.hscsyr.edu 766 Irving Avenue Syracuse, NY 13210 315-464-7109 315-464-7199 (fax)