Well, here in California things are of course different: in spite of
national trends, economic un-feasability, common sense, and all other
reasons, San Jose State University is ADDING the 510s -- not through
downloading, either, but as the main activity for an experienced
serials cataloger!

I supervise a student assistant, who xeroxes the List of Journals
Indexed from the front of each volume of an index, then checks each
title, one at a time, against our online catalog -- if we have the
journal, we add the 510, closing it out with ending date when index no
longer covers it. In about a year & a half, we've nearly completed the
Wilson indexes; when we finish them, the Reference librarians/subject
specialists will recommend which indexes should be done next. This
will continue until we have done every single index completed.

Business Index, for example, took 99 hours of student time, at $6.23
per hour, for a total of $616.77 --  it was a fairly quick index. I
cringe to think what Reader's Guide will cost. This does not include
the cost of my salary, or even the cost of the xeroxing.

Is it worth it?  Not in my estimation, nor really in the estimation of
most of the librarians. The decision was made by our Library Director
and our Head of Cataloging -- neither of them is a serials librarian.
I am not allowed access to OCLC to download the information, but must
do it all manually.

Does this make sense?

I feel a great kinship to Alice...

Kathleen Thorne
Serials Cataloger
San Jose State University
kathleen@sjsuvm1.sjsu.edu