A Study Of Interdisciplinary Research Needs: Results From Input Of Faculty In Six Engineering Departments In Prioritizing Serial Subscriptions

The issue of journal cancellations has been a subject of much discussion and controversy, research, conference presentations, and publication in the literature of library and information science, especially in the 1990's. Burgard & Easton (1999) highlight a selection of 14 library Web sites that describe their own cancellation projects. University faculty, particularly in the sciences and engineering, have been vocal regarding the loss of their research materials. Library administrators have found increasingly consultative methods of determining candidates for deselection, the need for the process (Sapp and Watson 1989), and the universality of the problem. A University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign library website for serials cancellations created their web page "in response to faculty perceptions that journal cancellations were only a local phenomenon" (Burgard & Easton 1999, p.70). Driven by publisher cost increases and reductions rather than increases in university library materials budgets (Rogers, Oder and Albanese 2000), (Nicklin 1991), cancellation of titles, often core title with long runs at the library, has been the widespread result. An analysis of the holdings of cancelled titles at the University of Arizona as reported by Bosch, Jones, & Simons (1994), using their library's online catalog, reveals that out of the sample of 31 titles, 2 subscriptions began in the late 1940's, 3 in the 1950's, 3 in the 1960's, and 11 in the 1970's.