5 messages: (1)------------------- Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 08:04:24 -0700 From: Mina Davenport <MDavenport@mail.cho.org> Subject: Re: [SERIALST] Current thinking on binding periodicals I stopped binding everything this year. We are a pediatric teaching facility, so I will still continue to bind our pediatric-related titles. I was going to bind such titles as Blood, because it does help to save space, but I may rethink that. We have quite a few electronic titles now, many of which we do not have the print. I am going to stop carrying both print and online for many of our titles next year and see how that goes, but with titles like American journal of medicine. I guess I have to drag myself kicking and screaming into the digital age... Mina Davenport, Librarian Childrens Hospital Health Sciences Library 747 52nd Street Oakland CA 94609 USA (510) 428-3448 (p) (510) 601-3963 (f) mdavenport@mail.cho.org -----Original Message----- From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum [mailto:SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU] On Behalf Of Mark L. Ferguson Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 8:41 AM Subject: [SERIALST] Current thinking on binding periodicals Dear all: I have recently had my budget for the binding of periodicals slashed from $3500 to $500 p/yr. This may only be a temporary situation but I have to come up with justification for why we should continue to bind, which has forced me to re-evaluate the value of binding, now that we depend on digital access to periodicals more and more, and on print less and less. We have moved a number of our key titles to an electronic subscription through either Ovid or ECO which guarantees archival access to all the issues we have subscribed to. And we have ceased our print subscriptions to them, when we could, and certainly stopped binding them. We have also begun to box all of our remaining loose journals that we subscribe to, which helps to organize and protect them at about one fifth the cost of binding. Its not as good as binding, but it is better than just leaving the issues loose on the stacks. We could stop binding altogether and simply box all print titles we receive and increase our reliance on electronic journals. I am interested to know what everyone else is doing with binding of periodicals in this age of digitalization. Is binding becoming a thing of the past? I am looking forward to all of your thinking on this matter. Mark Mark Ferguson Periodicals Librarian, Mahoney Library College of Saint Elizabeth, 2 Convent Road, Morristown, NJ 07960 (2)------------------- Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 10:22:45 -0500 From: Sarah Tusa <tusa@ALMARK.LAMAR.EDU> Subject: Binding periodicals The question of whether to continue binding periodicals is of growing concern. We still bind most of our periodicals, but I suspect that practice will dwindle in the next few years. It seems a lot of people are weeding/tossing bound periodicals that are included in JStor, and that will probably be our first step, whereafter we will cease to bind those journals. For other electronicallyavailable journals, it seems that the first question to be addressed would be the question of perpetual access. I am very leary of tossing any bound volumes for which I do not have written promise of perpetual access. Another concern is usage. I have read that there are consortia (or maybe less formalized library groups) wherein each member agrees to keep a certain list of bound volumes in perpetuity, so that others can discard them. This arrangement would appear to be very useful for older runs with continued high use (whether due to lending or local use) or low availability. (We keep some older journals largely because few other libraries in the region have a run that goes as far back as ours, and such runs help us maintain a net lender status.) We are certainly not on the forefront of this development, but I do see a shifting away from binding to follow behind the shift away from print journal subscriptions. It would seem, however, that each library will need to make some decisions about what to keep binding and what to keep at all, as far as print backfiles are concerned. Just my two-cents' worth. Good luck! Sarah Tusa Lamar University Beaumont, TX (3)------------------- Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 10:28:07 -0500 From: Dana Belcher <dbelcher@mailclerk.ecok.edu> Subject: Re: [SERIALST] Current thinking on binding periodicals I'm curious as to why you box all remaining current subscriptions. Just because you buy something, doesn't mean you need to keep it forever. That was the philosophy here until a few years ago. Computer journals are obsolete as soon as they're printed, so we only keep them for 3 years then we withdraw them. We've cut way back (over $25,000) in our microforms, and about 1/2 in our binding budget due to these types of retentions. We then offer the withdrawn items thru the duplicate exchange program. We still bind quite a bit (several thousand dollars a year), but the use of that collection is very low. Dana Belcher Assistant Library Director Acquisitions/Periodicals Librarian East Central University Linscheid Library 1100 E. 14th Ada, OK 74820 580-310-5564 dbelcher@ecok.edu (4)------------------- Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 10:32:37 -0500 From: "Mays, Allison" <maysap@millsaps.edu> Subject: RE: [SERIALST] Current thinking on binding periodicals About your binding question: Sounds like you don't have much choice: your budget is slashed. It's an interesting question and one I've thought about. What really brings it to mind is pitching out a run of a journal and I look at the bound volumes and think, "We could have spent the money it cost to bind those journals elsewhere." The waste makes me crazy. You can reuse the boxes. It's just up to you; one consideration is that if you don't bind, your journals are never off the shelf for a month or however long it takes to get them bound. Do you have a feel for how much the print is used? We have no way to track usage for our print, so it's just what we observe. We have to drag students kicking and screaming to the print. What I'm getting at is: does the usage justify having the expense of binding? Will it be a problem if they're in boxes? How likely are you to eventually pitch some of those journals, like the JSTOR titles? If it was me, I'd continue to bind ones like Time and Newsweek which come out more often and are heavily used and box the rest. A lot of it depends on format: those nice little quarterly ones that are about half an inch thick are great in boxes; the thinner glossy ones don't do so well and are more likely to get torn up. Is the print format going away? I hope so. I did an opinion piece in Against the Grain years ago and said that journals couldn't go online fast enough to suit me; I walk through our periodicals room and think, "This is a dinosaur." What really sealed that for me was having to shift the entire collection 2 years ago. That's when the electronic version starts looking REALLY good. When you think of the manual labor involved in maintaining a print collection, it's staggering. I'm just tired of the checking in, the binding, the claiming, the shifting, yadda yadda. I wouldn't want to be in the bindery business...that's the only unfortunate thing about the "new" scenario: some of those businesses will go under. I hate to see that but I'd say it's inevitable. Hope this helps. Hope you get your bindery money back; but by then you may have found a better way to use it. :-) Allison P. Mays Coordinator of Acquisitions & Cataloging Millsaps College 1701 N. State Street Jackson, MS 39210 601-974-1083 maysap@millsaps.edu (5)------------------- Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 11:47:06 -0400 From: Beth Burleigh <bburleig@pct.edu> Subject: Re: [SERIALST] Current thinking on binding periodicals Hi Mark, Our library's situation may not be like yours. Our college is a specialized techinical college, we bind a lot of our periodicals because many are not available online. We have found that even though we are told we will have access, if the publisher says pull the aggregators must pull that title. We have found microfilm that has articles cut out because the author requested that their work not be duplicated in this format. For our institution I believe we will always do quite a bit of binding. I also believe that as more and more titles we subscribe to become available online, we will certainly consider changing to online access. Beth Beth Burleigh Acquisitions Specialist, Periodicals and Electronic Resources Pennsylavania College of Technology Madigan Library Dif#69 One College Ave. Williamsport, PA 17701-5799 Phone: (570) 320-2400 ext. 7454 Fax: (570) 327-4503 e-mail bburleig@pct.edu
