Tech Library: A Model for Tomorrow
Appendix B: Academic Journal Subscription
Initial Email to Jeff Garrett - 3/1/2006
Hi Mr. Garrett,
My name is Angela Han, I am part of the Management Team for the IE 392 design class this quarter, and we are proposing to renovate Tech Library. I was wondering how the library chooses what academic journals to subscribe to for engineering.
Thanks.
Reply from Robert Michaelson – 3/2/2006
As you know, Jeff Garrett passed your question on to me.
There are several ways [Tech Library] subscribes to (or cancels) engineering journals.
For example, there may be a new journal that is requested by several faculty members. Unfortunately, our budget is very limited and the annual increase we get to our budget is very rarely adequate to cover the price increase of our existing subscriptions -- thus we must cancel subscriptions just to be able to afford the important journals we want to keep, and must cancel even more to be able to purchase new titles! A rare exception is provided by supplemental funding that the University Administration provided this fiscal year for materials on nanotechnology; because of this added funding we have been able to add new journals in that field.
Most of the new journals that we get are part of journal packages from scholarly societies. For example, we subscribe to all IEEE publications in online form only: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/dynhome.jsp. Thus, whenever the IEEE adds a new title, we automatically get access to it, and we add a record to our online catalog NUcat. Incidentally, we are increasingly converting our subscriptions to online-only, since in most cases this saves us money, as well as providing advantages of 24-hour access on both campuses (at the Medical School as well as in Evanston).
Another major package we subscribe to is the commercial product ScienceDirect http://www.sciencedirect.com/ which contains journals published by Elsevier and the various publishers it owns. Unlike the case of the IEEE package, here we don't subscribe to all ScienceDirect journals (we couldn't afford to if we wanted to, and many of them are relatively unimportant, or in fields outside of NU's teaching and research interests). Instead, we monitor the online usage by NU people of the journals that we include in our ScienceDirect package, and each year we adjust the package by eliminating the rarely-used titles and adding titles that we believe are more important to Northwestern (for example, titles for which we find a large number of Interlibrary Loan requests, or titles requested by faculty).
I am copying our Engineering Librarian, Anna Ren, on this reply, since you ask specifically about engineering journals and she might have something to add. But feel free to ask me, or Anna, specific questions.
Bob Michaelson
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