To Serialst:

As budgets shrink and journal prices rise - St. Cloud State University is trying to reconfigure how we access the journals we need to support the curriculum here.  One of the things that I am hoping to do is survey or contact in some way each of the colleges at our university to get some kind of feedback about what is useful to our faculty and what kind of compromises or adjustments they are willing to make so that our dollars will stretch further.

Has anyone on the list done this type of survey or serials evaluation?  We hope to make it an annual thing - taking one college (we have 5 academic colleges) each year and evaluating how we are doing with getting the journals they need.

As of now, I plan to develop a survey to get some idea of how faculty perceive the services in the serials dept. and accompany that with an "information packet" that would actually be an analysis of journals we get in print with information on their electronic counterpart.  One of the motivations for this is that our electronic holdings are used many time more than our print journals.  In addition, we spend about 3 times as much on print journals (about 1500 titles) as we do on electronic titles (about 15,000 titles).

I appreciate any feedback I can get from the list.

Susan Schleper
Serials Librarian
St. Cloud State University, MN
spschleper@stcloudstate.edu