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...!

Scavenger hunt and searching for a page

Professors are interesting creatures to deal with. If you do not work in academia, please read "The Edge Chronicles" to see what academics can be like with the professors of Sanctaphrax.

My second year working in serials (I work at my alma mater BA '96, MS-ITM '04), one of my former professors sent a non-English speaking student over to my office with a copied page from a journal. All that was on the copied page was part of a first paragraph. At the bottom of the page was part of the title of the serial, but no year or any other information. From what I could gather from the student, his assignment was to find the whole article and copy it.


I took the student to where we had the print serial and tried to convey to him that he now had 12 years of that serial to look through if he wanted to find it. And, of course, this was a serial that started numbering over with each issue. This meant that he would have had to go through 48 issues and look at each page number "45" to try and come across it. Well, the student did not speak enough English for this point to sink in and he kept looking at me blankly.


I took him down to the reference department and explained the problem. Fortunately, they were able to pull enough key words out of the paragraph and find the citation in a database. Whereupon he came back to me and I copied the article for the student to take to the professor.


An amusing p.s. to this story is that the professor had written the article originally. He was glad that we could help provide him with another copy of his article and the correct citation, because he wanted to reference it in another article he was writing!

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.

Numbering systems

I know I have blogged about numbering systems before...but... Can someone tell me the point of having the volume, number and whole number plus the date all for enumeration? Or for continuing to use two numbering systems for more than a century (e.g. Old Series Volume and Number, plus New Series Volume and Number)? Or for just abandoning all numbering and changing to month and year only (without any notice, of course)? And is there any sensible reason to change a publishing schedule in the middle of the volume, but with the same numbering but different chronology (thus making predictions and MARC records near to impossible!)? Do the publishers make rational decisions on these things or is it at the whim of the newest editor du jour? "Inquiring minds want to know...." (if you grew up in the 1980's you'll recognize the reference to bad tv commercials for the National Enquirer)

"And whosoever believeth in me, shall not die..."

The title that refuses to die is back. It returned to life last year after being officially "suspended" by its last publisher. Now, it purports to publish quarterly, but arrives at irregular intervals. Another unwanted surprise is the issue of it that just landed on my desk this morning -- Fall 2008 v. 58 no. 5!


I checked the publication information which reads "...is published quarterly (Winter, Spring/Summer, September/October, November/December)..." Ok. Let's look at this logically. Not only is there no sensible and consistent chronology or publication schedule -- but the one that landed on my desk does not meet any of those odd criteria...!