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?

A new twist to merged titles

I love serials. Really. They provide a constant supply of surprises. Not only did I learn that a bunch of the (once) consistent and predictable journals are now choosing to go to X number of odd regulars, but there was yet another title merger. There used to be 2 editions of an education journal, but they merged into one. They then dropped the subtitles they used to have that showed which section each belonged to. However, they kept the issn one of the old titles. One would think, that being educators, would motivate them to keep things as accurate and logical as possible.

Then there is the ever present Fibonacci Quarterly that now spans volumes, months, years and numbers all in one mighty leap! I just checked in v. 46/47 Mar/Apr 2008/2009 no. 2....and may I remind the editors of that journal that the ILS systems cannot put those sorts of combinations together? It makes a mess and throws the entire issue into a note instead of a MARC holdings format that is collapsible.

Name change and enumeration

OK. Editors are not the most logical people in the world, anyone who works in the serials world knows that.

However, if you change the title, the size and the issn of a serial, shouldn't you also change the numbering or at least start a new volume?

Journal "G" was a title that just "transitioned" to a new title, more pages and a new issn. But, the editors decided to keep going with the volume and numbers from the old title.

So, now I have two records that are going to be fun to deal with. Journal "G" now has volume 53 nos. 1-8 (January-August) 2008. And, now, we have the new title -- Journal "E" -- which has a different layout, a different scope, a different number of pages per issue, different issn and new title -- but has volume 53 nos. 9-12 in 2008.

Luckily enough, we don't bind this title -- which would have been a real nightmare to do! However, we do receive it on microfiche and I'm struggling how to figure out to alert the patron that the last 4 issues of that volume are shelved somewhere entirely different (we shelve microfiche alphabetically and do not keep name changes together).

If the patron should look in the OPAC for the record, there are 780 fields that tell them "continues" and "continued by"....but most of the times patrons are here on weekends and are simply "browsing" through a title on fiche or not sure which card it is on and pull a stack to look through on the viewer.

Name changes and splits

I think the one that comes to mind for name changes would be a journal that is in the education field and changed its title 5 times -- alternating back and forth between two titles. And then there is my favorite one in the physics field that split into sections A-G, but spun off even more with the subsections splitting off as well. That title wound up with 17 titles!