Hi,

We haven't run into a conversation about JSTOR, but I thought this related:

Sometimes we cancel journals that get low use because it would be less expensive to ILL them.  One consideration is that sometimes lending libraries use low quality, bitonal scan settings that are fine for text, but make images and graphs unreadable.  I think leaders are supposed to adjust their settings based on the content of an article, but in our experience many don't and I imagine some of our work study students fail to do this as well.  I understand why it doesn't always happen.

So, these articles sometimes make their way to patrons with unreadable graphs or images.  Most people don't need the images, but we did have a science faculty upset because he did need graphs to be readable.  Our staff might be monitoring incoming documents more clearly for this problem before sending them to patrons.  It is certainly possible to re-request the items, but of course that adds extra time and if the bad scan did reach the patron, it probably gives them a bad impression of our service.

Our art department also has a large number of print subscriptions in comparison to other departments, primarily for the reason that electronic images in databases sometimes don't exist or of low quality.  We take this into consideration when we consider cancellations every year.

I am the art liaison at our library.  I generally don't collect eBooks because the images are often not large enough to really examine the art.  I've seen some that were pixelated, which rendered them useless.  There are some text-based books where eBooks would be fine, but in the art eBooks I've looked at in EBSCO, I was really disappointed.  There are some great art image resources, like Oxford, but for general academic resources like EBSCO, I don't think the images are great enough yet




Jason Skoog
Archivist and Systems Librarian
Viterbo University, La Crosse, WI
608-796-3262

On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 12:02 PM, Barbara Pope <bpope@pittstate.edu> wrote:
Hello, everyone.

I wanted to thank those of you who responded to my question about your institution's practices regarding weeding of JSTOR titles, particularly those in art, music, sciences, etc., where there may be illustrations, photos, graphs, and other visual elements that might make some libraries want to retain the print holdings.  I wanted to get a feel for what other libraries are doing.  I received a large variety of responses and that was very surprising, ranging from those who advocate weeding all items which are present in the JSTOR Archives databases that the library owns to libraries that choose not to weed certain titles.  The choice to not weed certain things was based on a variety of factors, including estimated percentage of content being of a visual nature, faculty request, or the subject matter (such as color pictures in art journals).  One person I remember responded that copyright could play a factor in that some images may not be present in the JSTOR copy if copyright release of images was not secured.

I presented the variety of points of view to our Dean of Library Services in order to try to determine what our local practice will be.  Thanks again for your input.  It certainly made for a lively day of discussion on SERIALST.

Sincerely,

Barbara M. Pope, MALS
Periodicals/Reference Librarian
Axe Library
Pittsburg State University
1701 S. Broadway
Pittsburg KS  66762

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