Birth of the Serials Redesign Project

Provision of Access

The Serials Redesign Project (SRP) can be described as an endeavor to integrate the two concepts of access and ownership. The first step in this integration related to access and was taken in 1993, when LSU Libraries introduced the UnCover document delivery system. UnCover was developed starting in 1988 by the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries through its CARL Systems, Inc., which in 1993 formed The UnCover Company in joint partnership with B.H. Blackwell, the British subscription agency. The UnCover database contains approximately 17,000 journals primarily in the English language. Of these journals, an estimated 51% are in science, medicine, and technology; 40% in the social sciences; and 9% in the arts and humanities.

Among other services, UnCover provides subscribers with free online access and searching; delivery of full-text articles by fax within 24 hours for $8.50 plus copyright fee and applicable fax surcharge; and a current awareness alerting service covering the table of contents of up to 50 titles. For libraries, UnCover has a special service called the Customized Gateway designed to assist in serials collection development. Its features include support for unmediated—i.e., without the mediation of the library—article ordering, holdings match, and patron validation.

LSU Libraries took advantage of this service to provide faculty, research staff, and graduate students with direct access to serials that had been either canceled or never on subscription. Serials available at LSU were blocked from the system. LSU Libraries covered the expense of obtaining these articles except for those costing more than $26.50 or those from researchers making heavy demands on the system.

There are definitely problems with UnCover, including unclear fax copies of articles; difficulty in using the system; lack of foreign titles in the database; and publishers forbidding the transmission of articles from their journals. However, these problems appear to be more than offset by the cost effectiveness of the system. In a study covering a six-month period of UnCover use, Hamaker (1996), Assistant Dean for Collection Development at LSU Libraries, found that LSU Libraries spent $12,278, including $5,740 in copyright fees, to obtain 1,006 articles from 480 journals whose subscriptions would have cost $207,000. It was facts such as these that caused Hamaker to call for the integration of the concept of remote access into local collection development policies.

Adjustment of Ownership

With respect to ownership, by the early 1990s there was a growing realization within LSU Libraries that major changes had to be made in the method of dealing with the serials crisis. The old method had consisted primarily in distributing lists of serials holdings to the faculty in order to identify titles for cancellation. This method was perceived to have two basic faults. First, it was a negative exercise in the emotional sense, causing major discontent among the faculty. Second, the distribution of prepared lists of serials had led faculty to make poorly considered decisions and to identify readily as important titles that were not necessarily high in priority. Thus, in the 1992 cancellation project, the faculty reviewed over a million dollars in serials but identified less than $60,000 worth of titles that could be canceled (Hamaker 1994, 37). Combined with the perceived faults of the old method, a restructuring of serials holdings of LSU Libraries became regarded as necessary both to bring them into conformance with the current needs of the university, because no new subscriptions had been instituted since 1986, and to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the UnCover document delivery system.

The Faculty Survey

The above considerations gave birth to the concept of surveying the faculty not by having them mark prepared lists of serials for cancellation purposes alone, but by having them list on blank questionnaires in priority order the journals they considered important for research and teaching. This survey was to be conducted after faculty were instructed in the use of UnCover and after they were informed that the cancellations would provide resources for new subscriptions. The faculty was to designate on the questionnaires whether the journals had to be on the LSU campus or whether remote access to them via document delivery would be sufficient.

The concept was tested in 1993 with pilot projects with the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Geography & Anthropology. The results were promising. Whereas in the 1989 serials review project the chemistry faculty had ranked 410 titles as important to research and teaching, in the 1993 project it did so only for 287 titles. Moreover, in 1993, 35 titles on subscription in the Chemistry Library were omitted from the high priority list, in comparison with 1989 when 20 of these same titles were ranked as "essential." The outcome of the pilot project with Geography & Anthropology was similar. In 1989, faculty in this department ranked 1,808 titles as important to teaching and research, but in 1993 gave such status only to 535. In 1994, the LSU Faculty Senate Library Committee approved the concept, and the SRP was born. The project was intended to be carried out in three stages: (1) science and technology, (2) social sciences, and (3) humanities.

Phase one of the SRP began in the autumn of 1994 and lasted through 1995. To initiate the survey, library subject liaisons met with the faculty of the LSU academic units involved in science and technology. At these meetings, the liaisons explained the budgetary situation of LSU Libraries and the need to restructure the serials collection. The liaisons also gave a demonstration of the capabilities of UnCover.

Following the presentation, survey forms along with a cover letter were distributed to the faculty. Faculty were asked to list in descending rank order of priority up to a maximum of 45 titles important to them for teaching and research. In listing these titles, the faculty were instructed to disregard whether LSU Libraries had them on subscription or not. Each title also had to be designated as either DD (Document Delivery) or S (Subscription). In the first case, access to it could be satisfied by a service such as UnCover; in the second, it had to be on subscription at LSU Libraries.

The faculty were instructed that the ones marked for subscription should be "titles used on a daily or weekly basis or that are published in a format that requires direct access (i.e. illustrations that do not photocopy well)." Henceforth in this paper the titles so selected by the faculty will be called the "desired universe" of serials. Upon the return of the survey forms, the titles on them were bibliographically identified, classed with Library of Congress (LC) call numbers, and given their prices as of 1995. Table 1 lists the LSU academic units surveyed in the first phase of the SRP together with their faculty response rates.

Overall the response rate was 392 faculty members of 728, or 53.8%. However, if the branch research stations of the College of Agriculture are excluded as isolated for the most part from the LSU campus, the response rate becomes 384 of 662 or 58.0%. For a comparison, the faculty response rate in the 1993 survey of U.S. research-doctorate programs carried out by the National Research Council (NRC) was 51.0% (Goldberger, Maher, and Flattau 1995, 134). An additional indicator of the validity of the SRP survey was that a Spearman correlation coefficient of 0.56 was found between the percentages of faculty response and the 1993 NRC peer ratings of the scholarly quality of the faculty for the academic units where such comparisons could be made. This is evidence that the faculty tending to respond to the SRP survey were those more actively engaged in research recognized at the national level.

We will examine the validity of faculty ratings of serials and the options such ratings opened in serials collection development for LSU Libraries by the first phase of the SRP. Henceforth in this paper, this first phase will be referred to as just the SRP.