Date: Sun, 12 Jun 1994 19:26:55 -0500
From: Hannah King <KINGH@SNYSYRV1.BITNET>
Subject: RE: Faculty Participation in Collections (Sharon Murphy)

I thought others might want to know about how various libraries have
involved faculty in cancelation decisons.  My director (Sue Murray) and
I developed an evaluation form for each title on our cancelation list.
The titles earned their place on the list by being used less than 6
times for 3 years or more out of 5.

Faculty responded fairly well.  Couldn't get anyone to evaluate the
microbiology titles or the immunology titles.  And the process took
FOREVER, because I had to provide a lot of information we used in our
own evaluation for each faculty evaluator.  Quite a few ignored the
evaluation questions included in the form and just wrote in their evaluations
with little justification.  I'm not sure I would repeat the process
without substantially modifying the form.

Some elements included in our form:

        Bibliographic information
        Holdigns
        Indexing
        Local and regional holdings
        Cost
        Re-shelving statistics for bound volumes
        Signatures on current issue survey cards
        Impact factor for past several years as a whole and rank in subject
        category (from Journal Citation Reports)
        Editor, society sponsor if any

We asked faculty to rate the quality of the content using at least 4 issues.
We asked them to rate according to the Council of (not sure of the correct
name and am at home so can't look it up) Scientific Journals Editors criteria"
structured abstract?  accurate statisitcal analysis?  conclusions clearly
based on evidence discussed in text?  an other stuff?

We asked them to check currency of references, quality of illustrations,
and topic relevance.

Then we asked them to rate the journal:
        1. low qualtiy  -- cancel
        2.  average     -- cancel ILL ok
        3.  good        -- cancel only if necessary
        4.  excellent   --  keep

Oh, we also asked them to identify the appropriate audience for the journal
at our university:  students, grad students, faculty, clinical faculty,
research faculty.

As I said before, many did not answer our questions but we received a number
 a sufficient number, of returns recommending cancelation.  We avoided
canceling those titles strongly supported by faculty.  We did receive a
few complaints ("Why didn't you ask ME to evaluate that journal, I would
have told you to keep it!)

Hannah King
SUNY HSC Library at Syracuse
kingh@vax.cs.hscsyr.edu
766 Irving Avenue
Syracuse, NY  13210
315-464-7109
315-464-7199 (fax)