I find EBSCO reports to be a useful starting point, but have found no way around meticulously going through title by title for renewals. I mostly use the Annual Renewal List, and check in EBSCOnet a lot. We also have several years of print use data that are still quite helpful, especially for deciding if access in a full-text database is good enough. (That assumes print use correlates with online use—there’s a whole other can of worms.) So although EBSCOnet is a very helpful tool for gathering data, we still keep spreadsheets customized to our local needs.

 

Personally, I find the most challenging part of deciding whether to go online-only is publishers’ amazing variety of pricing models. A few still price their journals in ways that practically force us to stay with print, and to my amazement there are still some that offer no online option. At the other extreme are some that charge for print but offer free online. Then there’s the whole issue of backfile access, which is also all over the map. It’s really tedious and time-consuming to look at all that information and make decisions tuned to local needs. So I feel your pain.

 

Re: errors in the data, as Paula Sullenger noted, “Ebsco has always been quite open that they rely on customers to tell them about these errors and is appreciative when we do update the info.” All serials data sources have errors, and all rely on the serials community for corrections. Not long ago I looked at the accuracy of records for ceased periodicals, and found error rates of about 10% for OCLC, 33% for Ulrichsweb, and 43% for EBSCO’s Serials Directory (“Failure Rates and Publication Status,” Serials Review 36, 202-213.) These errors included no record at all, which is a bit unfair to EBSCO because my sample was mostly popular magazines. Since EBSCO records are created when libraries order titles through them, many little literary magazines and other non-academic titles aren’t in their database. If you exclude the “no record” errors, OCLC was the most accurate, followed by EBSCO, with Urlich’s marginally worse on failing to close records for ceased titles. I didn’t look at Swets, Harrasowitz, or any other vendors, so can’t say how EBSCO compares to other subscription agencies’ data. Anyway, bottom line is that serials data will always include some errors.

 

 

 

 

 

For many years I have been ordering the Online Availability Report (OAR) through EBSCO to help our collection development librarians make renewal decisions for the following year.  They use this report to decide what journal titles to renew, cancel, and switch from print to online.  This report is supposed to tell us what we currently have on order through EBSCO and is divided into 3 sections:  1) our print titles, 2) our print + online titles, 3) our online only titles.

 

Year after year I have seen “bad data” in this report.  For example, many titles that we have already cancelled appear on this report.  Also, titles that we switched to online sometimes appear in the “print” section.  In addition, I cannot customize this report when I order it.  As a result, dozens of columns that are not needed get downloaded into the spreadsheet.  I have reported these issues to EBSCO.

 

Cleaning up this report for our selectors is very laborious and time consuming.  I would like to ask the serials community the following:

 

·         If EBSCO is your vendor, do your selectors use the OAR or a different report/tool for their annual renewal decisions?

·         If EBSCO is not your vendor, who is, and how does that vendor help with this process?

·         Does the method you use indicate whether or not a print journal has an online alternative?

·         Are you aware of any good tools or methods that aid selectors in deciding what journal subscriptions to renew, cancel, or switch to online?

 

Thank you,

 

Davette Zinik

Auraria Library

Acquisitions & Serials Manager

1100 Lawrence Street

Denver, Colorado 80204

303-556-2625 (tel)

303-556-2623 (fax)

davette.zinik@ucdenver.edu

 

Serving the University of Colorado Denver; Metropolitan State College of Denver; Community College of Denver.