Microforms obsolete?

Despite the fact that the death knell of microforms has been repeatedly sounded in the library press for the past 10 years, I do not see the format going away anytime soon. A lot of libraries have invested too much money in the format for it to just disappear overnight.

I keep hearing that all of the microforms should be digitized: both from patrons and from the library world. However, there are issues blocking that from happening anytime soon: copyright, time (it will take a lot of time to digitize all of the microforms in existence), money to finance it, server issues, then who can get access and for what cost and et cetera.

We did a weeding project this summer in which we recycled the fiche and film that we now have electronic access to. I imagine that other libraries are working on similar projects.


I do not mind microforms -- they are a good way to compress a lot of information into a small area. But electronic access has added indexing and searching that is so much more accessible than microforms ever could be. The end of microforms may not have come but the time is drawing near.

At some point the ability to access the microform format might become so burdensome that a tipping point will be reached and digitization will be forced to occur. It is becoming increasingly difficult to get parts for microform readers and increasingly expensive to maintain them as the switch to electronic access continues to accelerate.

Yeah for D.H. Lawrence Review!

Kudos to D.H. Lawrence Review. I just received volume 34-35 2010. (No issues were published from 2005-2009.) Here is the exciting part: the editors put a note in the current volume that says "The Executive Committee has recommended that we date issues by the year in which they are published, rather than trying, largely in vain, to catch up with the earlier series..."

I can think of a dozen more publications that need to have this Executive Committee in charge of them!

The hidden dangers of working in serials

One of the many hidden dangers of working too long in serials...is learning Roman Numerals...

Does anyone else think in fluent Roman Numerals? Am I an oddity? After 10+ years in the field, I can glance at a journal, a book, or the end movie credits and go "that says "1976" or "2010" or whatever. I am not sure that this is a skill that really translates to the real world...and I might be one of the few people that got the joke about the "M&Ms being the official candy of the new millenium..." ((I even had to explain it to my husband and he has a mathematics degree!)) And now I seek out Roman Numerals in the real world and revel in my superiority of being able to read them...

Who knew what dangers lurked in the heart of serials...? ((with apologies to "The Shadow" radio show"))

A math journal

"Journal of _______ __________" used to be fairly on track with publishing and it even used some creative chronology to get caught up. It appears that they have given up, though, and just are going to publish at their leisure. I just received v. 35 no. 3 2006. No note from the publisher inside or any sort of explanation saying something along the lines of "we are going to do ___X___ and hope to be back on track in the next __x___ months" or anything like that.

I feel badly for any professor awaiting publication of this one....! Can you imagine the CVs and resumes that say "forthcoming publication(s)" and having this journal on your list? A professor might have to wait *years* before being able to change it to the "published article(s)" category.

So, what happens to the next 4 years of chronology? I just sent a query email to the publisher. Stay tuned for further developments...!

Name changes and irrational decision making

A journal is changing its name -- again -- for the fourth time. Thankfully, we only keep current print holdings and it doesn't effect us much, but pulling down records and updating them, creating MARC records in the ILS does take time and money to do. I realize that as a theological teacher's journal, it probably does not take such mammon-like things [like money] into consideration....

And I will not deign to address the issue of the Educational journal that renames itself every year to fit the political correct term of the moment for special needs students...This one is fun for students doing research to track down -- since we archive it on microform....and they have to hunt about for the current title record and then find it in the microform area.

It seems that some fields of study are more prone to change titles, like the infamous journal Teacher that changed to Teacher, Teacher and Instructor, Instructor and etc. over a short period to "better reflect the outlook of the magazine" according to the editorial in said magazine.

One of the few fields I would think it would make sense to change titles would be science, specifically in chemistry and physics. These journals actually change their scope when they change titles, and that is supposed to be one of the considerations on wheteher something 'counts' as a title change or not. However, at the point that one has 17 journals with the same name and different subtitles, like a physics journal I know of, I think it would be prudent to spin off titles altogether!

Does anyone work for a publisher and know how they decide these things?

Kindles and magazines

I'm not sure how I feel about "subscriptions" to weekly magazines on kindles or other e-reader devices. We have kindles in our library, but each one only has a preloaded set of books on it.

And how can you make magazine content more accessible to the visually impaired if it is on a Kindle?

And then there is the lack of archivability with an e-reader with content that may "expire" on a certain date...

The one reason I *might* enjoy magazine or even newspaper content on an e-reader would be that the soy ink would not rub off on my hands as I am reading an article!

Now that they are getting "programmable" paper that can be reused, I am sure some of the magazine providers will want to go into that format as well. I can hardly wait. No more worries for the stores about "please display until...." because on that date, the paper can change itself!

Creative chronology and bibliographies?

Ok. Just got one in the mail that has 2005 on the cover. However, the copyright on the inside says "2010"....If I was still teaching and I put a limit on the last several years of research, how would I know if the student was being diligent or not with that journal? Technically, the 2005 issue would be the last published and it came out in 2010, but...

I also enjoy prepub articles online....since with a lot of them there is no numbering if it is just full text, how do you cite that thing? Especially with the internal citation which requires author name and page number? I have seen quite a few that have the entire page span put at the beginning of the article, but then no pagination is given.

I think I prefer JSTOR, MUSE or other sites that faithly reprint or create pdf images of the articles. And JSTOR used to provide citation help on how to list a JSTOR article in a bibliography.