Machine-Readable Files for Serials Management: An Optimizing Program and Use Data (Research Note)

The unending battle to balance the serials budget within the larger information resources budget has provoked much thought (and many faculty members!). All too frequently the subjective measure of serials "value" is applied by librarians or faculty. This is done either by the librarian and serials personnel subjectively ranking the relative (perceived) worth of titles (value = rank) or surveying students and faculty, allowing them to make subjective evaluations of titles. There are, however, also some objective measures of value that may be employed. These include measuring value by the proportion of time a title spends off the shelf (sample shelves at random times, continue sampling until a sufficient database is established), by surveying students and faculty, inquiring which titles they use and how frequently, or by tallying the frequency with which a title is used (i.e., uses/year). In an earlier article a formula was presented, based on use and patron access time, which measures the effect of serials budget reductions on public service. The files of data created in order to apply that formula can also be used for other kinds of objective serials budget analyses. Here we will describe such analyses and present their application in a large engineering collection.