ASEE ELD
1995 Conference Summary

Serials: How Do You Manage

Session 2241. Date? 1995
Moderator: Karen Andrews, UCLA
Notes by Ann Ward (aeward@csupomona.edu)

Jump to:
Serials you Love/Hate to Sink Your Teeth Into
A Financial Model for University Research Level Engineering Library Collections.

Serials you Love/Hate to Sink Your Teeth Into (A Good Serial is Hard to Find)

Kate Herzog.

Kate began her talk by reminding us that engineering librarians have always dealt with "difficult" materials (technical reports, gray literature, conference proceedings, etc.) and she reviewed the intellectual processes and decision making processes that we have used to deal with this material. For example:

deciding to acquire a serial, being proactive vs reactive
format to acquire, e.g. paper vs fiche
how to treat it, how we knew or expected users to look for it
how long to keep it
cataloging & access problems, e.g. conferences published in journals, report series, lack of analytical cataloging & added entries.

Now that our users have easier (electronic) access to our holdings information, the cataloging and access problems are even more apparent. She showed examples from online catalogs to illustrate some of the problems we face in finding our own serials and tech. reports and asked "If we have a hard time finding out if we own something, what are our users to do?" Kate also feels that the keyword indexing capabilities of many of our OPACs have not made up for the lack of analytical cataloging and added entries.

She then made the connection that with the advent of the Internet & Web we are experiencing deja vu, going into another era of diffuse, hard to find gray literature. We face many of the same problems, plus additional ones. Primarily, now we may not even own the literature and the owner may drop it at any time. So how do we collect? On local machines or use pointers to location (but the address may change). Other questions she raised:

Even if we manage to "collect" this material, will it be usable for our users?
What is the value of union catalogs?
It's much more difficult to be proactive.

She closed by stating the need to develop standards in how to treat serials and how to look for them and reminding us to use the skills and knowledge we've already developed in dealing with the electronic environment.

Comments from the audience:

Rather than trying to apply our old systems, a new paradigm is needed for the electronic environment.
Much of the problem is really a cataloging problem. Kate replied that we needed to understand catalogers' desire to follow standards and that we need to work with them to have materials cataloged and analyzed in a way that meets our users' needs.

A Financial Model for University Research Level Engineering Library Collections.

Steven Gass, Stanford.

(published in Conference Proceedings, vol.1, pg. 1154)

Steve described a model he developed for the 1992/93 budget year to help determine the proper level of support for Stanford's Engineering Library. Anyone interested in the details of his calculations should get a copy of his paper from the proceedings. It's too complex to describe here.

Steve's model is based on the ARL/RLG Conspectus and the draft Supplemental Guidelines for the Technology Conspectus. He also used price information from Faxon, MIT Libraries, Stanford Libraries, Ulrich's, and Yankee Book Peddler. Primary components of the model are serials, reference, and monographs. Secondary components are access to information, document delivery, equipment, and retrospective needs.

To develop the model Steve:

used Publications Indexed for Engineering (sources used for EI/Compendex), determined those relevant to Stanford, and calculated the cost for a minimum number of titles needed for his library.
used data from Yankee (approval plan vendor) to determine acceptance rate in various call number ranges of primary and secondary importance to Stanford. Dollar values were then calculated.
calculated support for secondary components (access, etc.) by assigning each component a certain percentage of the total of the primary components.

The proposed budget resulting from the model was about 10% higher than his actual budget for that year.

Questions that arose included:

Is the Conspectus still relevant? Perhaps not, but it was useful for this exercise because it's the only thing available.
The percentages and estimates used in the model need to be tested.
And of course, Steve's faculty wanted to know if he was getting the right 50% of PIE titles.

The principle behind the model is that a certain percentage of annual scholarly output in engineering is appropriate for an engineering library to minimally serve its community. The model can also be adapted to other scientific disciplines and to undergraduate level collections by using other indexing and abstracting sources.

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