Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2001 15:50:41 -0500
From: Werner Lind <wlind@MAIL.BLUEFIELD.EDU>
Subject: Re: Backfile retention (Irma Nicola)

We only keep computer and educational technology periodicals for six months,
because
they tend to date rapidly; and we don't take nursing periodicals.  As for other
education
and psychology periodicals, we have not weeded any of these since I started here
in 1992, and in fact have accepted sizeable donations of older backfiles of some
psychology
journals, though many of the latter are housed in the basement storage unit.
These are at
times actually used; we recently had two separate ILL requests for articles from
them.  It
boils down to a judgement call as to how much space you have available and how
useful
the material actually might be to your patrons (and whether or not it is
available in full-text
in one of your databases, which wasn't the case here).  Any single library's
practices may not be a good model for all others; but so far, ours have worked
for us.

> Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2001 09:41:17 -0800
> From: Irma Nicola <INicola@APU.EDU>
> Subject: backfiles
>
> We have about 1700 titles more or less evenly divided between 2 buildings
> and 3 collections, since we always have space issues, a large part of the
> issue being backfiles, can I get an idea of how long small university
> libraries keep backfiles of certain topics, particularly nursing, psychology
> ,education and computer science?  I really want to hear from other similar
> sized institutions as to what is typical.
>
> At APU we have a student population of 6,000.
>
> My sense is that we should never have more than 10 years of any topic on
> paper.
>
> How do other places handle this kind of weeding?