Re: Your comments appreciated, or to class or not to class periodical collection Pennington, Buddy D. 05 Jul 2006 16:00 UTC
Has anyone out there bothered to ask users what their preference would be? It might be useful to poll faculty and students as to whether they prefer the current system or a different way of shelving the journals. Buddy Pennington Serial Acquisitions Librarian University of Missouri - Kansas City University Libraries www.umkc.edu/lib -----Original Message----- From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum [mailto:SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU] On Behalf Of Mitch Turitz Sent: Friday, June 30, 2006 12:57 PM To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU Subject: Re: [SERIALST] Your comments appreciated, or to class or not to class periodical collection Robin: Our library is a medium sized academic library. From the first day I started here, 19 years ago, I made arguments for using call numbers for the periodicals, which are still shelved by title and in a separate department for periodicals. All to no avail, I was given arguments like, "who is going to label, and move all the periodicals? We don't have the staff to take on that big a project!" (A good argument in my opinion), and, "the patrons like it this way, it's how they search for the titles." However there was no study done to confirm that. It was more the preference of the person in charge of the dept. rather than doing any kind of survey. The dept. head also insisted on a regular printout of all the journals located in the dept. by alphabetical order, even though they were all included into the OPAC. We discontinued that list, which required a lot of work to fit her specifications, after she retired. So we continue to shelve by title, but we leave the 050/090 blank, and add a 246 with a 2nd indicator of "9". Our vendor converted the display of any 246 09 to display in the OPAC as: "SHELVED AS: _____" this allows us to indicate that the binder may have continued to print the old or other title on the new successive entry title, so we may still find the title. This helps with titles which fluctuate like "Atlantic" and "Atlantic Monthly" - only one place to look for the title. There are better examples than this, but it is the first one that jumped to mind. We also use a location code of "Periodicals Dept." instead of "Main" (which is where the monographs are shelved.) Shelved by title does not allow for browsing by subject in the stacks, the way the monographs are arranged. Another argument for classifying together. I still would like to see our collection shelved by LC call number and integrated into the collection so that all like materials are shelved together, but I have been outvoted by people in higher positions. -- Mitch Turitz, Serials Librarian >>> rglaser@TROY.EDU 6/20/2006 2:20 PM >>> Hello! I work at a small academic library, and I'm adding periodicals to our library's catalog. Because we have only unbound issues kept in alphabetical order, I assigned the word "PERIODICAL" to the 090 field instead of an LC class number. However, some of the staff question that; they think an LC class number should be used. Our director told us to get documentation on why we should continue to use "Periodical" or use LC class. It would be helpful to know what other libraries do and why. I would greatly appreciate hearing from you! Robbin Glaser Technical Services Librarian Troy University, Dothan rglaser@troy.edu -- _^_ _^_ (___)-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- ( ___ ) | | | | | | Mitch Turitz, Serials Librarian | | | | San Francisco State University Library | | | | Past President, | | | | SFSU California Faculty Association | | | | voice: (415) 338-7883 | | | | CFA: (415) 338-6232 | | | | FAX: (415) 405-0394 | | | | | | (___)-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-==- ( ___ ) V V http://www.cfasf.org (SFSU web site) cfasf@igc.org) or Mitch Turitz (x. 87883; turitz@sfsu.edu) & http://www.calfac.org/ (CFA State-wide web site)