Retrieval requests of non-current journal articles from storage
Over the last six fiscal years requests for non-current journal articles retrieved from storage has dropped significantly. The decline is most dramatic in the number of requests LMU patrons made: from 470 in FY2004-05 to 206 in FY2008-09. The decline is also evident in the number of requests to fulfill interlibrary lending requests, though less dramatic: from 364 in FY2004-05 to 173 in FY2008-09. It is clear that patrons overall are demanding less of our print collection.
* It is not yet known how retrieval requests for non-current journal articles will be affected by having that collection now stored locally (as of FY2009-10) instead of off-site. As the collection was moved from off-site storage to in the basement storage area there was a six-month period when requests for journals were not filled. In addition, as the collection moved on site the methods used to gather statistics changed. To that end, the FY2009-10 period represented in the above graph is an estimate and only represents a six-month period.
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This is really interesting, Marie. Does your current print journal collection circulate? What trends are you seeing there? Or if not, have you devised another way to evaluate use of the current collection?
Lisa,
Our current print journal collection doesn’t typically circulate. If somebody needs to make a scan or a slide of a journal page we’ll make an exception and check out an issue since he/she can’t do that process in the library.
Our only ‘measure’ of the use of our print collection at this point is the usual things that libraries notice but don’t really keep track of, like noting which titles always need to be reshelved, which ones are out of order, etc; we don’t currently intentionally track the use of our print collection.
We’re making a big push to move toward e-only when a stable option is available. That means that we will soon be paying a lot more attention to the print that is left on the shelves because there won’t be an electronic option for those titles. At that point we’ll be interested in evaluating use.
-M