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.