Magazine makeovers and new editors

Anytime I get a letter from a publication that says something about a new editor or a new direction, I cringe. I cringe because I know what will be next -- a makeover, a name change, a format change, a new publisher, a size change and occassionally spin off titles with new issns.

It seems to be the season for makeovers. A couple of our journals have converted to online-only this year. A couple of our journals have changed sizes in the MIDDLE of the volume, which is a problem for binding purposes. An entire collection of our journals was purchased from one publisher to another and is changing where they are going to be available online. And then there is the publisher that has issued an oversized magazine since it was created and just this week decided to change sizes, its layout and went from staples to perfect binding...

I just wonder, at times like this, if the publishers have ever heard the phrase "if it ain't broken, don't fix it?"

Title changes...that aren't quite...!

This week the library received a journal that looked like it had suffered a title change. However, after perusing the journal and finding the editor's comments, plus the subscription information....it became another case of a title change that wasn't.

It seems that the editors of this fine magazine decided it needed a makeover, so they made the pages glossier, changed to a perfect binding (instead of staples) and merely changed the layout and masthead -- but NOT the name. The ISSN stayed the same and the real title (that had not changed one whit) was buried in the publication and subscription information...

Now editors are big on makeovers of the magazines, but this is the second journal to do this in the last 3 or 4 months, so I am beginning to sense a pattern here....

Britannica Fiche

Where do I start with my feelings on Britannica Fiche? An odd quote about "Britannia ruled the waves and waived the rules..." comes to mind....! I do not think the creators of this technology thought beyond the space saving feature.... Where I work we still have collections of this stuff and it is now impossible to read. We have a new micro form machine that zooms up to 96X and can also scan it directly (on a flatbed scanner), but the print is still unreadable. I all but stood on my head and tried to find a way to get a coherent copy of an article for a patron and still had to request it through inter-library loan.

I *like* technology. I find it fascinating -- I even have a Masters in Information Technology Management -- I just wish some of this purveyors of information would *plan* ahead. Obsolescence is a fact when it comes to technology. Tablets and papyrus gave way to the book and now we have e-books and readers... But at least with tablets, papyrus and books, one could still (theoretically) be able to read from the text 40 years after it was created...!