Hi Susan,

We are the central library of the Science Faculty of the Hebrew Uni. in
Jerusalem.
We serve 4 departments: Physics, Chemistry, Life Sciences and Applied
Sciences.
Each of our journal titles' records  has a field that relates it to 1 of the
4 depts.

When we are forced to do a massive cancellation (which happens once in a few
years) - we produce lists of titles
according to the dept., which include price, impact factor, usage statistics
and the like, and send it to the depts.
with a deadline until which they have to let us know which titles they
"allow" us to cancel.

3 major problems with this method:
1. There are always the titles that are interdisciplinary - where do you put
those.
2. Every time there are patrons that say that they have not seen the list,
and why did we cancel "their" title etc. etc.
    This is not the library's responsibility, and we send them back to the
dept. to complain, and sometimes a title is
     indeed re-ordered.
3. Now, with all the agreements about electronic journals, this process
becomes much more complicated, as not
    every title is cancellable, so we enter into the lists only those titles
that are cancellable (which does not leave
    us with many titles that are, which is a big problem if you have to
cancel x titles in order to reach a given amount
    of money).

Hope this helps - Idith

 ********************************************

    Idith Bar-Nachum
    Head - Periodicals Dept.
    Harman Science Library

    Hebrew University                       Tel.  972-2-6584567
    Givat-Ram, Jerusalem                  Fax  972-2-6586237
    Israel 91904               Email: idithb@savion.cc.huji.ac.il

********************************************

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Schleper, Susan P. [mailto:spschleper@STCLOUDSTATE.EDU]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 27, 2002 7:41 PM
> To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
> Subject: Journal evaluation
>
>
> 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). =20
>
> I appreciate any feedback I can get from the list. =20
>
> Susan Schleper
> Serials Librarian
> St. Cloud State University, MN
> spschleper@stcloudstate.edu
>