Editors, Publishers and Numbering

There must be a place in the universe somewhere that editors gather and conspire on making arbitrary changes to serials that will frustrate library workers. It would amuse me to be able to work for a publisher for 6 months or so to see if decisions really are carefully thought out or completely arbitrary in some cases.

One case that comes to mind is the weekly magazine that changed publishers and decided to start over with volume 1 at that point. The magazine got so many complaints about this decision (from libraries) that after volume 3 it went back to the old numbering as if volumes 1 through 3 never existed and there had been continuous numbering all along (it was on volume 176 when it changed publishers and went to volume 180 right after year 3). I can imagine what a mess this made for catalogers since it certainly made trying to get the MARC records to display correctly in the ILS a challenge.

Another journal, this time in the science field, that caused great concern was one that just dropped all numbering and chronology altogether. After 3 or 4 months the publisher did put the chronology back onto the cover, but it made it hard to check in an item that had no enumeration and no chronology! The journal editor did write a piece in one of the issues about why the change was made -- to make the journal appear current no matter when someone picked it up.