BackTalk: A Sacred Cow Bites the Dust

If there Is one thing we know for certain in the chaotic world of serials, it's that you simply must check in new issues of your print magazines and journals. How else will you know you're getting what you've paid for? How else will you catch title and frequency changes, splits, and mergers? How will you know whether or not to claim an issue? And perhaps most vexing of all, how on earth will you know when it's time to bind? From a public service standpoint, how will patrons know whether the new issue of the Atlantic has arrived without a note in the OPAC?

These are all fair questions. However, there is a new question that has begun presenting itself over the past five years, one that we serialists tend to avoid: If journal check-in is essential for all of these reasons, why are we only doing it for what is, for many of us, a shrinking portion of the serials collection, the portion that gets the least use?

At the University of Nevada, Reno, we offer our patrons access to the full text of over 15,000 journals and magazines. Of those 15,000, roughly 3000 come via print subscriptions; the rest come online through various publisher packages, aggregated databases, and individual online subscriptions. In the past, our small Serials Department has spent a significant amount of time on check-in, binding, and claims and has done a remarkably good job. Of course, in the past the library's entire periodicals collection consisted of those 3000 print subscriptions.

That changed recently and dramatically thanks to electronic journals. CD-ROM databases largely behaved in ways we understood; they were shipped to us physically, checked in, claimed, cataloged, and shelved. The web turned things upside down. Yet we continued to organize our work as if our primary duty was the tracking and maintenance of print journals and magazines. We were essentially ignoring online materials once access was established and links put in place. The real culprit here is the Tyranny of Physical Format. A print journal will clutter up your office until you do something with it, whereas online access (for which you may have paid months ago) will sit quietly in the ether.

While considering the abolition of check-in, we took a random sample of reshelving statistics in our print collection. Though we expected to see fairly low numbers, we were shocked to discover that the average print issue gets less than one use shelved in Current Periodicals.

If check-in is so important, why is no one checking our online journals to see whether the current issue is available online, has been delayed, changed titles, or been merged with another publication? The thought that we could do so is laughable.

Is check-in really that important? For one thing, check-in allows us to tell users whether an issue has arrived, not whether it is in the stacks. It's true that check-in allows us to monitor changes. But if a journal goes from monthly to quarterly and we don't catch that, will it inhibit patron access? And given the extremely low usage levels of our bound journals, routine binding is nothing more than expensive and labor-intensive.

So we made a decision to redirect our limited staff time from an exacting, time-honored procedure toward activities that will have a more direct effect on our patrons' ability to find and access the journal content they need.

In place of traditional check-in, we have instituted a quick and relatively sloppy process of comparing incoming issues with a printed list of subscribed journals and magazines. Those that match are sent out to the Current Periodicals stacks. Those that do not are inspected to see whether they represent title changes; if not, they are thrown into bins and are culled periodically by subject specialists. Instead of binding issues, we place them in pamphlet boxes for shelving; each box gets an item record and a call number, and each issue that goes in a box gets a label identifying its home box.

Some admittedly minor service improvements materialized immediately. We no longer have to tell patrons that a particular issue is at the bindery and won't return for five weeks; also, boxes cost far less than bindings. Current issues get into the stacks much more quickly, too.

The most dramatic difference is in the time we now have to manage and troubleshoot electronic access. Whereas one full-time staffer previously spent most of her time monitoring and administrating title changes and the like, now she devotes that time to establishing access to online journals, troubleshooting access problems, delivering information about those resources to other departments, organizing license files, etc.—in short, facilitating access to the materials our patrons are using instead of closely managing those they are not.

Overall, we are surely missing some problems with the print collection. We no longer have a way of routinely checking that every issue of every title has been received. If we had unlimited staffing, close management of the print journals might be an option. However, sloppiness in the management of our little-used print journals is a fair price to pay for a significant increase in our effectiveness at providing the materials our patrons do use, in the format in which they clearly prefer to use them.