But this begs the question as to what criteria you use to define "core". If they closely align and support your curriculum, you should see evidence of use. If they aren't being used, then they prima facia do NOT closely align with your curriculum, regardless of how relevant the publisher has made the title of the journal sound.

In my experience discussing and debating this topic, I have found that many librarians, especially us old timers that long predate online periodicals, are so used to using "proxy" determinations of importance that we've lost sight of the fact that those rubrics were originally just proxies because we had no way to measure actual use.

Now that we have actual use measures, it's time to discard the proxies.

As to the faculty using other affiliations, we have that a lot, or at least we think we do, being a small university with a lot of faculty who got their PhDs from much larger ones with far bigger collections. I'm of two minds about this philosophically. But pragmatically, since we're in a constant state of budget crisis and cancellations, my attitude has had to become one of pure triage and that means that if they are happy using another source, then we should free up that budget money to get other titles that our patrons don't have another source for (as reflected in ILL data, for instance).

Melissa

On Fri, Jul 7, 2017 at 11:48 AM, Steve Oberg <steve.oberg@wheaton.edu> wrote:

In terms of journal review, another thing that should come into play, or may, is what you define as your “core” journals. These by definition are those that closely support and align with your curriculum, but there are other aspects to their definition as well. And by definition, these are ones you want to sustain in the long term whereas other subscriptions are of lesser priority. At my library, we have undergone an in-depth, multi-year process of defining core journals in each of our disciplines and are now actively working on ensuring that we have current subscriptions to all of them, with as complete a backfile as possible. And because they are core, things like cost-per-use may not weigh as heavily as otherwise might be the case. This will also help if in future, we need to make cuts to our current subscriptions. We’ll try to preserve the core and those journals not defined as core are then possible targets for elimination if the need arises.

Of course, what gets defined as core can be a moving target, but I think we are much better off having defined the process, which can then be adjusted over time.

Steve

Steve Oberg
Assistant Professor of Library Science
Group Leader for Resource Description and Digital Initiatives
Wheaton College (IL)
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Melissa Belvadi

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University of Prince Edward Island

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