SURVEY: How do you know how many e-titles you own? Rob Withers 30 Apr 2003 12:39 UTC

The Technical Services and Collection Management divisions of the Academic
Library Association of Ohio will be holding a workshop on electronic
journals in mid-May. We are interested in providing an overview of what
practices people use to determine how many e-titles they provide access
to.  How does your institution do it? Please share your ideas...

1a. When asked to estimate the number of serials subscriptions, do you
include electronic titles? Titles which provide articles through
LexisNexis and other databases?

1b. What is the job title/classification of the person who tracks this
information?

2. Do you include links for free serials titles into your catalog? Include
these in the number of e-journals or periodicals to which your library
provides access?

3a. Do you track the number of titles available in part or in whole only
through research databases? How do you collect this information? How often
do you update it?

3b. In the event that only selected articles are available from a
database, do you exclude these titles? include them as if the  whole
title were availabe? use a fractional number?

3c. What is the position title/classification of the person responsible
for collecting this information?

4a. How do you estimate the long-term costs for subscriptions for
individual titles?
4b. How do you estimate the long-term costs for subscriptions for
titles obtained through aggregators and/or consortial deals?
4c. How do you estimate the ratio for cost per electronic title over a
multi-year period-- especially if it's through an aggregator?

5. If you could wave your magic wand and change something about the ways
in which libraries provide access to e-journals, what is one thing that
you would change to make it easier to gather and present statistics on the
number of e-journal titles, what would it be?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Rob Withers
 Assistant to the Dean & University Librarian
 Miami University Libraries
 Oxford, OH 45056