The core journal definition is worth considering as another approach, that’s all I meant to convey. I would put it differently than how Melissa chose to articulate it. There are many other factors besides use that should go into collection building and review for journals. Use is a primary factor but it’s not the only factor. We developed our own definition of what is core that is useful to us, and measures of actual use are not discounted entirely, but they are not as significant a factor as for other, non-core journal titles. It’s important to also note that we are heavily invested in purely use-driven journal access as well, via pay-per-view. As we review those stats, we may decide to switch from pay-per-view to a subscription or vice versa, but if the journal in question is in our core journal list, we’ve decided that subscription access is what we want. That’s just one example of how we find a definition of core journals to be useful.

Also, those of us who remember the “old days” of mostly print collections DID have ways to measure actual use, and utilized them. They weren’t as easy to gather or as rich of course as for e-journals today, but methods were used.

The bottom line is that in my view, it helps to have a more nuanced approach to evaluating journal collections, with a variety of assessment methods.

Steve

Steve Oberg
Assistant Professor of Library Science
Group Leader for Resource Description and Digital Initiatives
Wheaton College (IL)
+1 (630) 752-5852
 
NASIG President

On Jul 7, 2017, at 10:09 AM, Melissa Belvadi <mbelvadi@UPEI.CA> wrote:

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