Claire:
  Don't let the format of the material confuse you.  What you want to do is
first find out what the faculty NEED, in terms of CONTENT.  The carrier (is
it web-based or paper or CD-ROM?) is secondary.

  It is my opinion that the reason faculty think that "electronic serials"
are cool is so that they can do their research from home or their office
without having to go to the library.  YOU have to show them what's out
there.

  In my opinion:  the subject specialists (i.e. Collection Development)
should determine which electronic resources are appropriate for which
subject area.  This should not be all left up to the Electronic Resources
Librarian.  You will be busy enough with trying to get a CD-ROM network up
and running, maintaining changes in the number of CD-ROMs you received,
checking to see if an electronic subscription service can handle I.P.
checking, answering questions like how to download to disk or how to print
from a network, etc.

-- Mitch
  _^_                                                 _^_
( ___ )-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-( ___ )
 |   |                                               |   |
 |   |     Mitch Turitz, Serials Librarian           |   |
 |   |     San Francisco State University Library    |   |
 |   |     Internet: turitz@sfsu.edu                 |   |
 |   |                                               |   |
( ___ )-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-==-( ___ )
   V                                                   V
       Rule #1: Don't sweat the small stuff.
       Rule #2: It's ALL small stuff.
--------------------------------
"Claire T. Dygert" <cdygert@AMERICAN.EDU> wrote:

Hello to the list,

I've recently been hired as the Serials/Electronic Resources Librarian at
American University.  Part of my mission here is to incorporate electronic
serials into our print serials collection.  My understanding is (excuse
me--I've only been here a week and a half!) is that we have many members
of the teaching faculty who are eager to have access to online serials.  I
am very interested in doing a survey of the faculty to ascertain such
things as follows below, and I'm wondering if anyone out there has
conducted such a survey.  I'd like to know:

1)How they faculty members defining electronic journals?  Are they
including online full-text selections of print journals?  Journals
published online only? Newsgroups, listservs, computer conferences?

2)What benefits do they perceive the availability of electronic journals
will afford them, besides ease of possible desk-top access?

3)How many faculty on campus are participating in scholarly activities on
the internet?  Have any of them published in electronic journals?  Do they
plan too?

4)What electronic resources are they currently utilizing, and how
important do they see them to their scholarly activities?  If these
resources were available through the library would they encourage their
students to access them as relevant to course content?

I could continue, but I think this gives the list a good idea of what kind
of information I'm seeking.  I'm very interested in what others have done
in gathering this information.  (I guess I should say that my strong
interest is in how new, online-only, peer-reviwed publications are
impacting the way scholarship is being done...  The list of these titles
seems to be growing exponentially.)

In advance, thanks.

Claire Dygert
Head, Serials Department
American University Library
cdygert@american.edu

------------------------------