The Balance Point: Courage of Our Convictions: Making Difficult Decisions About Serial Collections

Abstract

Three academic librarians, a library administrator, a serials librarian, and a collection development librarian, discuss pressing serials issues as they plan for a move to a new library building. Professional perspectives on serials are juxtaposed as they grapple with issues such as limited storage for paper journals, rising costs of serials, and problems related to serials check-in, e-resources, and document delivery. IntroductionRegular readers of this column will notice a new name in place of our esteemed past coeditor, Markel Tumlin, who is devoting himself to full-time research this year. I had the pleasure of presenting a workshop with Markel a number of years ago at a North American Serials Interest Group conference, and since then I have enjoyed following Markel's contributions to this column in Serials Review. I believe I speak for many other readers when I say that his wit and eloquent writing style in the column were much appreciated and will be missed. I look forward to working with and learning from my experienced and talented coeditor Kay Johnson as we carry on the column's tradition of hosting a platform for stimulating serials discussion where voices in the serials community-some in harmony, others in counterpoint, and others perhaps even dissonant-can come together to find perspective about serials in the "balance point."

Developing criteria for the withdrawal of print content available online

“…One reason may be that for libraries with print volumes and less pressing space constraints, it may be simplest to leave the print collection as is. There may also be several other reasons, including distrust of the permanence or stability of electronic archiving (Duranceau, 1998; Flecker, 2001; Hughes, 2002; Reich and Rosenthal, 2003) and maintaining the traditional role of libraries as repositories (Duranceau, 1998; Scherlen, 2004). Furthermore, electronic journals do not always duplicate the print exactly.…”

The Claim

“…Although librarians have voiced a variety of perspectives on Anderson and Zink's experiment (Tumlin et al, 2003;Scherlen et al, 2004), there can be little doubt that the future of check-in is bleak. Indeed, as libraries' collections evolve to meet users' changing needs, it seems inevitable that, sooner or later, check-in will suffer the same ignominious fate as the kardex.…”