N. Schoch et Eg. Abels, USING A VALUATIVE INSTRUMENT FOR DECISION-MAKING IN THE CANCELLATION OF SCIENCE JOURNALS IN A UNIVERSITY SETTING, Proceedings of the ASIS annual meeting, 31, 1994, pp. 41-50
Citations number
24
Categorie Soggetti
Information Science & Library Science","Information Science & Library Science
Academic libraries are being forced to make difficult decisions regard
ing journal collections due to rapidly increasing costs and shrinking
budgets. Nowhere is this problem more acute than in the sciences where
it is not unheard of for an entire departmental budget to be dedicate
d entirely to serials. The process for title elimination at a universi
ty usually involves invited input from faculty members. Typically, the
decision-making process consists of faculty reacting to a list of tit
les provided to them by the library. Often little valuative informatio
n is available to assist in the decision, forcing faculty to make sele
ctions based on their recollections of the value of the titles. At the
University of Maryland at College Park Libraries, a valuative instrum
ent is being developed to allow science librarians to identify titles
which appear to be likely candidates for cancellation based on a list
of attributes including cost (per year, per issue, per page), publishe
r type (commercial or society), value-added features (peer review), an
d citedness (ISI impact factor). The instrument, developed with facult
y input, will provide science librarians and faculty with data to assi
st in the difficult task of collection reduction. This paper describes
the instrument and the results of a pilot test in which the instrumen
t was used to select candidate titles for cancellation from a sample o
f science journals.