Good Idea for Subscription Evalutions

Back in June, the Rainbird Librarian at Ketchikan public library wrote about how she determined the popularity of magazines in a post at http://ketchikanpubliclibrary.blogspot.com/2008/06/and-winner-is.html:

As part of the decision-making process, I go through and count how many times each issue of each magazine has been read and/or checked out (one of the reasons we ask people to leave magazines on the tables rather than reshelving them is because we keep count of this use).

Based on this process, she has ranked 109 serial publications at the library according to their usage. Most popular magazine? Fine Homebuilding followed by National Geographic. See her post for more results.

This seems like a very user way of making choices about what must stay and what could go in a pinch. It's an idea I might run by people in my library to see if we could make it work here. One measure we use is requests for articles from our state employee table of contents service.

Do you measure magazine/journal usage at your library? If so, how?

Sticker shock presentations...Wow!

We all hear about the growing costs of serials, and about some amazing titles in particular, but this graphic representation from the Engineering Library at Cornell University really brings it home. This site also includes links to an earlier version and to a similar exhibit from the Health Sciences and Human Services Library at the University of Maryland.

While shocking, it's kind of fun. I don't know whether seeing such extreme cases makes all journal price increases seem bad, or if it puts a whole different perspective on "normal" prices and price increases.