annually we send to each academic department a list of journals to which we subscribe with funds for that department. well, we send them a list of *print* journals, and every year that list gets shorter as we move to more online-only subscriptions. this bums me out because it makes it appear that the library is annually less committed to supporting research and teaching in departments. we need a way to show our academic departments that in fact, we are expanding our support of their efforts. we came up with the following plan.
we decided to include online subscriptions in the list of journals we send to the departments. if we subscribe specifically to an online journal, it is easy to add to the list because we’ve already attached an order record and assigned a fund code in order to pay the invoice; it’s simple enough to pull those titles out of the system. the tricky part was figuring out a way to gather together all the titles that came as part of a package, for which the library – not the departmental funds – paid a lump sum.
the library subscribes to many big journal packages, several of which give us perpetual access to content. none of the thousands of these titles had order records attached to them. in essence, these titles were hidden from us because we had no way to track them; bibliographic records were ingested to the catalog but when you came across one you could never be sure why it was there or to which package it belonged.
over this past year the serials department has been attaching order records and assigning fund codes to bibliographic records of journal titles if we have perpetual access to the content. we’ve been attaching order records even if the amount we paid for that specific journal was $0 (that is, if we paid $X for the entire title list instead of an amount for each journal) so that we could assign a fund code based on the subject content of the journal. in this way we can quickly pull a list of all the journals assigned to “fund X” or “package X.” in addition to the inventory aspect of this project it allows us to gather a true title list for the departments. departmental funds may not be used to pay for access to a journal but the content is still used by a department.
our sociology department, for example, will be pleased to see a list of available journal content in their subject area go from 95 titles to 450.
