Re: Survey of Faculty Use of EJournals Mitch Turitz 19 Sep 1996 22:10 UTC
Claire: Don't let the format of the material confuse you. What you want to do is first find out what the faculty NEED, in terms of CONTENT. The carrier (is it web-based or paper or CD-ROM?) is secondary. It is my opinion that the reason faculty think that "electronic serials" are cool is so that they can do their research from home or their office without having to go to the library. YOU have to show them what's out there. In my opinion: the subject specialists (i.e. Collection Development) should determine which electronic resources are appropriate for which subject area. This should not be all left up to the Electronic Resources Librarian. You will be busy enough with trying to get a CD-ROM network up and running, maintaining changes in the number of CD-ROMs you received, checking to see if an electronic subscription service can handle I.P. checking, answering questions like how to download to disk or how to print from a network, etc. -- Mitch _^_ _^_ ( ___ )-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-( ___ ) | | | | | | Mitch Turitz, Serials Librarian | | | | San Francisco State University Library | | | | Internet: turitz@sfsu.edu | | | | | | ( ___ )-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-==-( ___ ) V V Rule #1: Don't sweat the small stuff. Rule #2: It's ALL small stuff. -------------------------------- "Claire T. Dygert" <cdygert@AMERICAN.EDU> wrote: Hello to the list, I've recently been hired as the Serials/Electronic Resources Librarian at American University. Part of my mission here is to incorporate electronic serials into our print serials collection. My understanding is (excuse me--I've only been here a week and a half!) is that we have many members of the teaching faculty who are eager to have access to online serials. I am very interested in doing a survey of the faculty to ascertain such things as follows below, and I'm wondering if anyone out there has conducted such a survey. I'd like to know: 1)How they faculty members defining electronic journals? Are they including online full-text selections of print journals? Journals published online only? Newsgroups, listservs, computer conferences? 2)What benefits do they perceive the availability of electronic journals will afford them, besides ease of possible desk-top access? 3)How many faculty on campus are participating in scholarly activities on the internet? Have any of them published in electronic journals? Do they plan too? 4)What electronic resources are they currently utilizing, and how important do they see them to their scholarly activities? If these resources were available through the library would they encourage their students to access them as relevant to course content? I could continue, but I think this gives the list a good idea of what kind of information I'm seeking. I'm very interested in what others have done in gathering this information. (I guess I should say that my strong interest is in how new, online-only, peer-reviwed publications are impacting the way scholarship is being done... The list of these titles seems to be growing exponentially.) In advance, thanks. Claire Dygert Head, Serials Department American University Library cdygert@american.edu ------------------------------