ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

INNOVATIONS: Access to serials: Local improvements may make a difference

By David Trithart Reference Librarian Potsdam College of SUNY

Every library has a limited list of serials to which it subscribes. Beyond that it relies on interlibrary loan or some other means to obtain articles for its patrons. Most libraries have seen the use of this service expand in recent years. The number of journals grows and the proportion represented in the local collection inexorably falls. It is commonly believed that the advent of indexes on CD will contribute to the demand for articles not in the local collection.

What alternative is there to increased reliance on borrowing or document delivery services? We determined to try to improve access to the journals we already receive. Like many libraries, we recently introduced compact disk indexes and have seen their use grow quickly. We also noticed that there remained a bottleneck in the search process. Checking the citations obtained so quickly from the CD had to be done manually in the library’s serials list. The first remedy that occurred to us was to somehow match the journals on the CD with a list of those we receive, and have our titles highlighted or otherwise noted on the screen.

We have suggested this to CD producers, and there is some expressed interest, but nothing to show for it yet. Since we catalog our serials and shelve them by call number we would need to show, in addition to the holdings of a title, the call number, in theory this should be possible since we, like most libraries, have our serials and holdings in machine-readable form. The screen display for each citation could include local holdings information obtained from that list.

But this didn’t seem to be an immediate possibility. A less automated approach was, however, within the range of our abilities. Using Microsoft Works (a simple, widely-used database program) on a Macintosh computer, we produced a database of all the periodicals to which we had subscribed since 1980. Holdings and call numbers were included for each title. For each index we noted those titles on our list which were covered by the index. The lists provided in the indexes themselves were supplemented with information taken from our serials control system (in this case SC350) which allowed us to search and display the 510 field of the MARC records for our serials. This information was displayed in a simple, single-line format in alphabetical order by periodical title.

This project took some time, but was made considerably simpler by having some of this information already on disk. The rest was added over the course of several months. The products have been some 11 index-specific lists that are kept on the consulting table beside the appropriate index. Rather than check citations against a large alphabet of titles, users can check a short list that pertains to just the index they are using. This is particularly useful at the CD indexes. The Wilson Disc indexes we have only extend back to the early 1980s, so the lists we produce are completely accurate as to our holdings of the journals indexed. Maintaining the lists has proven to be quite easy. Both staff and students agree that the time to produce the lists was well spent.

The interesting development is that our requests for interlibrary loans have decreased quite significantly for the twelve months since these lists were produced. This may be coincidental, but other libraries I have contacted do not report this trend. We may be able to attribute this decrease in more effective use of our own collection. The CD indexes make it easy to search multiple years of an index, and the lists we have produced enable users to quickly check which ones are here. Circulation of bound and unbound periodicals the past year showed a 15% increase compared to the average of the previous 4 years, and was 26% above the immediately prior year.

To see interlibrary loan going down at the same time that local circulation is on the rise does raise some questions. Users may be relying on articles several years old instead of requesting newer articles from journals we don’t have. For most undergraduate research and paper-writing this is probably satisfactory. It just might be that some fairly simple efforts to improve access have contributed to this result.