Phase I: Title Selection Guidelines

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Title selection process
Campus selection process
Publishers in study
Scope of selections
Role of campuses
Next steps

Title Selection Process

The objective of the Collection Management Initiative is to collect data on the acceptance of digital research journals as a substitute for print and apply these findings to framing future library strategies.

To begin the research process journal titles have been identified that are available in both print and digital form. These titles will form the control and experimental base for data gathering. A database of these titles has been built containing ISSN, title, publisher and print subscriptions held by campuses at the execution of the licenses. The data has also been sorted into subsets for each campus that includes their known subscriptions and 646 titles for which no subscription data are available. The database and campus subsets are available at <http://www.slp.ucop.edu/initiatives/cmi/jrnldata/>.

Campus selection process

We are asking librarians on each campus to please do three things at this time.

• Identify titles that you would like to withdraw from the stacks and place in the experimental group.
• Identify titles that you strongly want to keep on the shelves for the control group.
• Provide any information on campus subscriptions that is not reflected in the database.

Your preliminary selections should be sent to the CMI project by June 1, 2001. Specific instructions on how to report campus preferences will be distributed by mid-May.

Publishers in study

The publishers/providers and number of titles included in the database are:

ACS Web Editions (28 titles)
American Physical Society (7)
Blackwell Science (199)
Cell Press (6)
Company of Biologists (3)
Elsevier (780)
Harcourt (59)
Highwire Press (1)
IDEAL (161)
Institute of Physics (30)
JSTOR (201)
Kluwer (439)
Liebert (27)
National Research Council Canada (14)
Project Muse (129)
Royal Society of Chemistry (29)
Wiley InterScience (308)

The following publishers may not be able to provide usage data required by the project and may be removed from the list at a later time:

Company of Biologists
Elsevier
Kluwer
Harcourt
Blackwell Science

Scope of selections

In this first selection process please be as inclusive and expansive as possible in selections. We hope that you will be able to identify between 100 and 400 titles total. You may wish to confer with faculty and staff on the selections but the actual selection process is up to each campus library that chooses to participate. The goal is to have 400 experimental and controlled paired titles distributed throughout disciplines and campuses.

Role of campuses

A campus that serves as an experimental site for a title will by mid-August remove selected issues from the stacks. These issues will be relocated to a Regional Library Facility or other storage location. During this period campuses will monitor recall of print copies from storage and secure information from the requestor regarding the reasons for the request.

A campus that serves as a control site for a title will retain it on the shelf and also record usage data. Campuses may serve both experimental and control roles for different titles. The obligation to gather data will continue until August - September of 2002. Procedures and Instruments to record this information are under development by the project's Operations Advisory Committee (OAC).

Next steps

After this first round of selections the CMI staff in consultation with campuses will match your selections with those of other campuses to create a final list of experimental and control titles. Your first selection will probably be modified in this process.

This experiment is not intended to be permanent. Any selections that need to be returned to pre test status will be. Thank you in advance for your extra efforts on behalf of the Collection Management Initiative research.

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