As Christina mentioned, some states had union lists of serials back in the 1980s or 1990s. Generally one institution had a grant and the staff to input the LHRs
on behalf of everyone in the state. Unfortunately, it was an unfunded mandate. Once the LHRs were in, it was up to the institutions to maintain their own holdings, and some didn’t have the staff to do so, or had bigger priorities.
Now that we migrated to OCLC WMS, our OCLC LHRs _are_ our local holdings, and they are a mess after migration, which was expected. But, we don’t have
duplicative holdings anymore, and the migration clean-up has also been the impetus for us to fix long-time holdings errors. I agree with Steve and Kevin about weighing priorities, and that electronic resources are a bigger concern. We’ve never had robust
lend/reproduce/reserves permissions set-up in our ILS/LMS for our continuations, and that’s of higher importance than our print holdings.
-
Kay
Kay G. Johnson
Head of Collection and Technical Services
McConnell Library, Radford University
540-831-5703 <kjohnson497@radford.edu>
From: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum [mailto:SERIALST@LISTSERV.NASIG.ORG]
On Behalf Of Steve Oberg
Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2017 3:23 PM
To: SERIALST@LISTSERV.NASIG.ORG
Subject: Re: [SERIALST] LHRs
I’m glad that Kevin mentioned the automated approach of uploading or updating holdings. I know this is available as an option and if we ever do wish to rectify our situation, that’s the approach we’ll take, similar to what Robert mentioned.
Note however the mention of substantial staff resources, which is important.
Regardless, as I sometimes call it, this is a BFTF situation. BFTF = Bigger Fish to Fry.
Please know that I understand and appreciate the value of ILL and I also know that our local decision is detrimental for ILL. However, we are all given a set of choices to make locally based on all kinds of factors. The reality is that
the BFTF in our case, and I suspect in many other libraries, is ejournals and other e-resources, not print journals. We are down to around 300ish titles (I’m not sure we’ll ever get much below that figure but we’ll see) and have been focused primarily on procuring
electronic subscriptions whenever possible. We have 6-7,000 such titles (a conservative figure, and not counting things available via aggregators), and this is where the predominant demand and use are to be found. It seemed logical to me that given limited
staffing resources, we should refocus our efforts, that ensuring that smooth and reliable access to our online content should be our top priority. We could continue to dot every i and cross every t for our dwindling print journals or we could prioritize online
stuff. We couldn’t do both and it was an easy choice.
Does someone, somewhere pay when we cut back in a certain area? Yes. Because we are doing this, does that mean it’s the right thing for every library? No, not necessarily.
Going back for a second to the automated or batch load…Honestly, I think that’d be great but even so there are still BFTFs for us locally. I’m fed up with and am constantly seeking was to reduce the amount of duplicative maintenance work
my staff does. In our case, the batch load might be workable but it’s is still yet another thing we would have to monitor and attend to over time, and also in our case, I happen to know that it wouldn’t be a slam dunk. Meaning, we’d run into problems due to
historical practices.
With apologies for all of the colloquialisms but without an apology for making some hard decisions,
Steve