Hi Susan,

At the University of Florida, we have several African and Latin American
journals which are not available online.  I would hardly call them
"inferior" or behind the times ... the publishers can be struggling to
survive, especially the ones which are subversive to their government's
interest!

These journals are a challenge to check in, as "missing" issues may not
exist, and if it were not for our check-in records, it is sometimes
likely that no one else in the USA would know if an issue came out.  For
that matter, our users would not know what issue we have.

Of course, medical journals, for the most part, are a different story.
But then, we also have a lot of local journals dealing with Public
Health issues and traditional-medicine (medicine mixed with shamanism
and faith healing) which are also not online.  With the Public Health
journals, it is not always a priority of the government to disseminate
the information on the internet.  The cultural insights gleaned are
worthy of research, and they are often cutting-edge simply by their
existence.

Of course, I am on the side of "you *must* check in print journals",
especially when electronic equivalent does not exist.  We are so lucky
here in the USA to have the electronic resources we do.  And I am very
fortunate that I am in cataloging and not acquisitions/check-in!

 - Hank Young
University of Florida

-----Original Message-----
From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum
[mailto:SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU] On Behalf Of Susan Wishnetsky
Sent: Friday, November 09, 2007 10:02 AM
To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
Subject: Re: [SERIALST] Serials check in?

At 04:10 PM 11/8/2007, you wrote:
>My question is - if you didn't check it in, how do you know if you are
>missing it because it was never received?

You don't.  But if it has an electronic version, it doesn't matter.
And if it doesn't have an electronic version, it's obviously an
inferior journal which nobody reads, so it still doesn't matter.
The check-in people you cut from the staff were the ones
who also did claiming, so nobody's claiming anything anyway.
If you're wasting some money on paper copies you're not
getting, well, you're saving money on staff, so it all evens out.

If that's not enough, you can charge your patrons for ILLs. If
they don't like it, enlist them to write letters to those dinosaur
paper journals urging them to get with the times, already.

How's that?  SW

>Just a thought,
>
>Susan Andrews
>
>Head, Serials Librarian
>Texas A&M University-Commerce
>P.O. Box 3011 - Library
>Commerce, TX 75429-3011
>Susan_Andrews@tamu-commerce.edu
>(903)886-5733
>"Your Success Is Our Business"

Susan Wishnetsky
Electronic Resources Librarian
Galter Health Sciences Library
Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University
303 East Chicago Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60611-3008

(312) 503-9351
FAX (312) 503-1204
pasiphae@northwestern.edu