Assessing current print periodical usage for collection development Gracemary Smulewitz Distributed Technical Services Rutgers University Libraries

The previous slide was a Counter report downloaded from the publishers site representing usage for a collection of electronic journal titles. Everything is pre-designed to give the appropriate information in spreadsheet format for evaluation and manipulation. Although accessing electronic usage data is somewhat labor intensive, gathering usage data for current print periodicals is much trickier and has been a manual process and therefore is often not done. Our loose issue periodicals are shelved by title and the majority our bound after a full volume is received. They do not circulate outside of the library and each issue is not barcoded.

Two years ago as online periodicals grew in number and budgets were declining, we felt it necessary to measure current print usage and compare the data to online usage for the same titles. Our first objective was to determine how to design a tool to measure this information. How would we get the valuable data. From our ILS we could extract our active titles and subscription information from : – bibliographic records – serial control records – order records – circulation records

Our Systems Administrator produced a report in Excel of all active print periodical subscriptions that are shelved in our Reading Room. Included in the report were: – Title number for easy access to the record – ISSN – Print holdings statement – All URLS if the title was available online – The Purchase Order and Fund Code – The library holdings library. Various data from the report would be extracted and used for different purposes throughout the process. Initially this data had to be enhanced to capture usage. The method had to provide the ability to continuously record information. Our Access Services staff alerted us to a feature in the ILS called “marked as used”

Mark as Used - Items with barcodes could be read as they were being re-shelved and each read would be counted as an in-house circulation. The question was how to apply this to non-barcoded issues of periodicals? To Start: Using duplicate barcodes One item was added to each bibliographic record. (the title # from the bib records was helpful here.) The item represented the journal title, not an individual volume or issue. A barcode was added to this item The item was shadowed so that it was not visible to the public. Simultaneously a copy of the Excel report was reformatted to include a row for each title and a corresponding cell for the ISSN and the barcode. The duplicate barcode representing the title was attached to the appropriate cell.

Snapshot of ILS screen - adding shadowed items for non-classed periodicals

Excel title list with assigned barcode

Signs were placed throughout our Reading Room asking that users not re-shelve journals. Before re-shelving journals, the staff matched the title with the entry in the Excel document and wanded the barcode from the document. This process prompted the “mark as used” function and recorded 1 in-house circulation for that shadowed item. A report ran monthly to capture the in house uses for these titles. The usage data would then be incorporated into a spreadsheet with data from our original Excel report.

The Mark Item Used Screen in the ILS

The spreadsheet would contain the URLS of the periodical titles that had electronic access. One of the benefits of using the spreadsheet is that the data can be filtered. We filtered by the URLS, to identify providers and download usage data to incorporate into this spreadsheet. These two data elements, print and electronic usage were compared. The resulting comparisons validated our previous perceptions of use.

A sample of one months use for print only

Monthly collective comparisons of usage and the respective percentages

In the previous slide all titles are print subscriptions with online access. Although we suspected that print was not used much, if at all, seeing the usage disparity documented, actually astounded us. On the right side of the spreadsheet is a column for fund codes. The fund codes were included in the initial report from our Systems Administrator and allowed us to look at the data by discipline. The code contains two letters that indicate the discipline. The results from our pilot were very satisfactory and to date, all libraries at Rutgers have implemented this method of gathering usage data for current print subscriptions.

Our next steps were to consider changes, either cancellation or Format. Evaluated all print subscriptions where online access was also provided to determine if print was mandatory to have online access and if online was archived. We cancelled print titles that met our criteria. Evaluated all print only subscriptions to see if online was available and if the online met our criteria. If so, we moved to online only. Evaluated remaining print titles to determine if they were still valuable and if there were multiple subscriptions across the campuses. Non-valuable and multiple subscriptions were canceled.

Some numbers from our recent project: 864 titles were cancelled 472 titles were changed to online only Total- 1336, the majority of these changes were based on the usage data. Remaining print periodical titles: less than 5,000

Special thanks for the success of the pilot and the continued process to: Yuhwei Ling – Receiving Coordinator, Distributed Technical Services at the time of the project, is now part of Integrated Information Systems Rebecca Martinez - Coordinator/Serials Team Leader, Distributed Technical Services Chris Sterback – System Administrator, Integrated Information Systems Questions ???/Discussion my contact information: Gracemary Smulewitz Head, Distributed Technical Services – ext 161.