NASIG Newsletter

22:1 (2007:03) Other Serials News: Charleston Preconference: Serials Resource Management

February 27, 2007 at 6:50 pm | In Other Serials and E-Resources News | Leave a Comment

OTHER SERIALS NEWS 

CHARLESTON CONFERENCE 2006 
SERIALS RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Reported by Fran Rosen 

Presenters: N. Bernard “Buzzy” Basch, Basch Subscriptions, Inc.; Tim Bucknall, University of North Carolina, Greensboro; Rick Burke, Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC); Julie Gammon, University of Akron; Chuck Hamaker, University of North Carolina, Charlotte: Jim Mouw, University of Chicago; Rollo Turner, Association of  Subscription Agents; Susan Zappen, Skidmore College 

On Wednesday, November 8, I attended an afternoon preconference on Serials Resource Management at the XXVI Charleston Conference.  Participants had a chance to hear about and discuss many different issues in serials. 

The preconference was moderated by N. Bernard “Buzzy” Basch of Basch Subscriptions, Inc.  Buzzy set the tone for the discussion, and helped pull the different ideas together.  Speakers included Susan Kappen, Associate College Librarian for Collections, Skidmore College; Julie Gammon, Head of Acquisitions, University of Akron; Tim Bucknall, Assistant Director for Information Technologies and Electronic Resources, University of North Carolina – Greensboro; Rick Burke, Executive Director of the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC); Rollo Turner, Secretary General of the Association of Subscription Agents and Intermediaries; and Chuck Hamaker, Associate University Librarian for Collections & Technical Services, University of North Carolina – Charlotte.   

Susan Kappen talked about journals at Skidmore College.  She said they cancelled 25% of their journal budget in 2004, have gotten decent budget increases every year, and are still overspent for 2006.  They are spending almost 80% of their budget on serials, and they pay 18% more for 885 print journals than they spend for access to 35,000 electronic ones.  They could cancel some print and rely on ILL, but they need to maintain the subscriptions that are tied to the curriculum.  She said it is clear that there will never be enough money for journals, so we need to look for solutions other than just finding more money.  Working with faculty to make sure they retain copyright, setting up digital repositories, and supporting open access are some things that we can do. 

Julie Gammon told us about the University of Akron.  She said that OhioLink gives them a great advantage.  They are spending more of their serials money through OhioLink and less with subscription agents.  She wondered if libraries are still trying to spread out our subscription dollars, to avoid being completely dependent on one subscription agent.  She also talked about change and how they are re-training library assistants to deal with new tasks. 

Tim Bucknall talked about giving our users what they need, when and where they need it.  He is able to track journal use for institutions using Journal Finder, the link resolver that was written at UNC-Greensboro.  In every institution free and open access journals are either the most used or second most used category of journals.  Tim looked at institutions around the country to see if they include free and open access journals in their catalog or link resolver.  He found that these titles are probably not in a library’s catalog, and may or may not be in the link resolver.  The easiest titles to add to a link resolver are the DOAJ titles, but these aren’t necessarily the most often used titles – for UNC-Greensboro, only 1 of the top 30 most often used free/OA titles was in DOAJ.  The most used title was the local newspaper.  He stressed that we need to work harder to find these titles and to make them available to our patrons.  Tim talked about some of the ways we can get people the information they want, when and where they need it, such as Google Scholar, COinS, Blackboard and other course management systems, context-sensitive linking, and bookmarklets. 

Rick Burke talked about how SCELC coordinates consortial purchasing for over 90 California libraries.  He showed us the database SCELC uses to track journal packages, license terms, and which members subscribe to which resources.  SCELC is involved in a joint project with Serials Solutions to develop an ERMS for the consortium, and he showed us that too. They are trying to coordinate purchasing and to help with cooperative collection development. 

Rollo Turner talked about ASA and what it does around the world.  They work on detecting and preventing fraud; for example, in some places, personal subscriptions are purchased and then re-sold to libraries.  They are also working on basic standards covering how to treat journal contracts.  They look at price increases.  He said this year prices went up 9%, but there is huge variation within each publisher’s list.  (Elsevier really did have an average price increase of 5%.)  He talked about the role of subscription agents; both large and small ones can offer processing help with electronic journals.  He stressed that subscription agents can provide many different services, including negotiating with publishers on behalf of consortia.  He said he did a survey and determined that approximately 15% of electronic subscriptions break down at renewal.  The problem is mostly with publishers, but this is a very difficult service area.  He also talked about claims.  Subscription agents spend a lot of time and money on claims processing.  He thinks it would be useful to have a dispatch database, which libraries can use to determine if issues have been mailed out yet; if not, the library could wait to submit a claim. The last speaker was Chuck Hamaker.  He started by expressing his irritation when a patron uses Google to access library-subscribed resources and then thinks she is getting it free through Google.  He asked why people don’t understand about IP recognition, and answered that 76% of downloads from journal publishers indexed on Google are PDFs.  There is no co-branding when they access the PDF, and nothing that says this came from a library.  (JSTOR is the exception.)  He called this an absolute failure of identification.  He proposes that there be a page that comes up before the PDF with the library’s name.  He pointed to a related issue, that they are seeing a drop in the number of searches in some databases but this is not correlated with a drop in the number of downloads.  This means patrons are finding library content using Google Scholar or other methods, and are not relying as much on the bibliographic databases that we purchase access to.  Users are starting their searches outside the library environment, and are losing understanding of how they found the item.  He also discussed funding.  University priorities are retention and graduation rates, which mean it is harder to get consistent budget increases for the library; instead of increases to base, his library is getting recurring one-time allocations.  Electronic journal price increases have been controlled, but they are still 2-3 times the inflation rate.  We need solutions, but OA and IR are difficult concepts to get across to administration and faculty.