“S” is for Subscription Review
In the spring, a librarian’s fancy turns to … serials?
Well, yes, especially this spring! In the library, we lock in next year’s subscriptions many months in advance in order to take advantage of discounts and get a head start on paperwork (and the electronic equivalent). This means that the library and the faculty are now carefully evaluating a large percentage of our journal, magazine, newspaper, and database subscriptions and planning for 2016.
We undertake comprehensive subscription reviews on a regular basis in order to fulfill our mission to provide information resources that enable “students to become intentional, self-directed learners and faculty and staff to pursue their goals” (see the library’s Statement of Purpose). These reviews are necessary because the curriculum changes, college personnel change, information needs change, and the available pool of periodicals, databases, and digital collections themselves also changes. Over 80% of the library’s collection budget is devoted to subscriptions of various sorts, so these reviews also help us to be good stewards of the financial and information resources in our care.
What does a subscriptions review involve? There are many more things than I can count, but the three primary ones are: data (lots and lots of data; then more data); spreadsheets and other systems to store, process, and analyze the data; time (lots and lots of time).
At this stage of the process, time is the operative word. Earlier in the semester, the time spent was mostly that of library staff, and while the preparations for the review took nearly all of my working hours as well as many hours from my colleagues, the data points and files greatly outnumbered the minutes and hours in our collective work days. Now that the data have been processed and extracted into summary reports, many more people are involved and devoting their time to the review. Over 220 faculty members are currently evaluating the lists and reports, identifying titles that are no longer needed, and prioritizing the rest. Once they each complete an individual review, each academic department will conduct a collective review. This is a data and time-intensive process; while some decisions can be data-driven, in this review, each title is evaluated and ranked by our faculty, first individually and then as a group. Such close analysis is essential in liberal arts college libraries like ours, which are curriculum, usage, and need-driven.
Subscription reviews direct our focus back to mission and need (current and anticipated), to wants, desires, and hopes, and in these challenging times, to fiscal realities too. Because they lead us back to sources (information springs, as it were), it seems fitting that they often occur in spring, a time of growth and rebirth.1 They are cooperative, community efforts. And yes, we hope that this review, like previous reviews, will yield fruit: resources that support the research needs of our great students and faculty members.
My thanks to all of our wonderful faculty members who are investing their time in evaluating these lists!
1 “Spring, n.”. OED Online. March 2015. Oxford University Press. 22 April 2015.
