You bet your your bottom serials dollar, we would cancel the journals
the A & I publishers deemed too expensive to include!  It is not only
not "tacky" for the A & I industry to bring this issue to our attention
BEFORE it becomes a footnote to 1995 serials price histories, it is
exactly what librarians have been asking for!

So far, we have learned that:--

(1)  At present, most publishers supply their journals free of charge
to major A&I publishers.  Presumably, they agree that inclusion in a
widely held index is equivalent to free advertising that directly reaches
their target clientele.

(2)  Shift this cost from the journal publisher to the A&I publisher and
the A&I publisher will pass it along to the libraries in one of two forms:
... higher  A&I subscription prices, or
... lower numbers of titles indexed (specifically, lower numbers of EXPEN-
SIVE titles indexed)
... or, perhaps some combination of higher prices and fewer titles than we
would otherwise expect.

(3)  The A&I folks want to avoid cancellations of their services, so they
have to find out where the market is most flexible, price or service,
before they can proceed.

(4)  Already, we are in a spiral in which price increases cause cancella-
tions which increase publishers' cost-per-subscription which causes price
increases.

Seems to me, we are ALL better off if we do not generate that
spiral anew, i.e., if publishers continue to subsidize the cost of providing
journal issues to A&I publishers.  It may be the equivalent of charging all
subscribers for the cost of providing an extra service to library users, but
that may be a much smaller burden than sharing the increased cost-per-
subscription among a significantly smaller subscriber base.

In my library, it would work that way, no matter how the A&I folks respond.
If index prices rise, I will cancel journals to pay for them because I
cannot cancel the indexes (unless I can substitute a satisfactory competing
index) because without the indexes I cannot even send students to a neighboring
library or offer them document delivery to satisfy their needs.  On the
other hand, if relatively expensive titles are dropped from certain index
services, I will still cancel them, because I have a box of 98 titles
faculty have requested in the last few years which ARE indexed in indexes
we subscribe to, so I would drop the unindexed titles to fund the new titles.
But mine is a severely underfunded library.  Maybe it is different than
most???

Judith Stokes
Serials Librarian
Rhode Island College
JSTOKES@RIC.EDU