Library Periodicals

[lpayne]

We are still purchasing hard copy magazines such as People, Oprah, Men's Fitness, etc.  in addition to some of the discipline specific professional journals.  We are currently evaluating the cost of these magazines based on usage.  I would like to know if others in the VCCS are still purchasing magazines and if so, how are you gauging usuage, other than circulation?

[kmccarrell]

We are still purchasing hard copy magazines such as People, Oprah, Men's Fitness, etc.  in addition to some of the discipline specific professional journals.  We are currently evaluating the cost of these magazines based on usage.  I would like to know if others in the VCCS are still purchasing magazines and if so, how are you gauging usuage, other than circulation?

Here at BRCC, the majority of print subscriptions is the popular titles. As such, we are making decisions pretty much exclusively based on circulation. For many titles, there is only 1 or 2 people that actively use it, but we consider that to be OK and sufficient for us. We've cut a large amount of disicipline-specific titles because they were getting 0 usage and costing a fortune. If a title only costs $20-$25, that is not much different than a book which may also get less than 1 checkout. If each issue gets checked out, that's 10-12 uses which would be great for most of our book titles!! For titles that are more expensive, I consider cost per use to evaluate if we should continue.

[lpayne]

We are still purchasing hard copy magazines such as People, Oprah, Men's Fitness, etc.  in addition to some of the discipline specific professional journals.  We are currently evaluating the cost of these magazines based on usage.  I would like to know if others in the VCCS are still purchasing magazines and if so, how are you gauging usuage, other than circulation?

Here at BRCC, the majority of print subscriptions is the popular titles. As such, we are making decisions pretty much exclusively based on circulation. For many titles, there is only 1 or 2 people that actively use it, but we consider that to be OK and sufficient for us. We've cut a large amount of disicipline-specific titles because they were getting 0 usage and costing a fortune. If a title only costs $20-$25, that is not much different than a book which may also get less than 1 checkout. If each issue gets checked out, that's 10-12 uses which would be great for most of our book titles!! For titles that are more expensive, I consider cost per use to evaluate if we should continue.

Thank you for the feedback.

[mmyers]

We also have mostly popular titles. We have 1 print academic journal, at the request of the department. The rest were cut due to cost. If we didn't have the specific title available electronically, we looked for alternatives to suggest to the various departments. We've been through at least one accreditation visit (for nursing) that I know of since cutting the print journals and didn't have any issues. We don't track circulations, but from what we see, the usage is worth continuing to have the titles. I'm sure there are some that never get used. But we see students, faculty, staff, and community members reading the various magazines and newspapers to justify the subscriptions. Nothing is overly costly, and like Kyle mentioned, even if it's only used once per year by one person, that's as much as can be said for many books in our collection.