Collection Development Statement
Policies For Serials Review

Revised August, 2000

There is a constant need to review our serials commitments in light of changes in scholarly communications, changes in university programs, and the situation of the collections budget. The principles elaborated below are systemwide and should facilitate the process. These principles are relevant to determining what to retain, what to eliminate, what to convert to electronic access, and what to access by other means.

Selectors may undertake serials review without knowing the final budget figure for collections. The figures relating to inflationary increases and changes in the annual collections budget are supplied by the Office of the Associate University Librarian for Collection Development and Management as soon they are known.

In presenting information related to the serials review, selectors should inform faculty of the ongoing problem with the cost of serials, changes in the nature of scholarly communications including the availability of other means for accessing journal literature, such as e-journals, RUL's new subsidized document delivery service, ILL, and RDS. Sample statements on these issues will be supplied by the Office of the Associate University Librarian for Collection Development and Management.

Policies

1. Eliminate print journals that are available as e-journals from the producer (e. g, IDEAL and Elsevier titles in ScienceDirect) provided that the e-journal is not linked to a print subscription (i.e., ACS journals.) Producers have control over their products and, therefore, are more reliable source than vendors of journal packages from a variety of publishers.

2. Eliminate all duplicate print subscriptions when there is an e-journal equivalent available from a 2nd party (such as ProQuest's Research Library and ABI/Inform). Remaining print copies will be available in the research collections only: business and nursing at Dana, the rest of social sciences in Alexander, art and art history in the Art Library, and science in the research libraries on the Piscataway and Cook campuses.

3. Obtain user input from relevant faculty.

4. Be informed by use factors such as citation data, impact factor, cost/use or cost/citation if such data are available for your subject area.

5. Consider availability through document delivery, RDS, or from full-text collections, such as Dow Jones.