Systematic Serials Selection Analysis in a Small Academic Health Sciences Library* BY GARY D. BYRD, Chief Medical Librarian University ofMissouri-Kansas City School of Medicine Kansas City, Missouri
MICHAEL E. D. KOENIG, Director ofDevelopment Institutefor Scientific Information Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ABSTRACT This paper describes the implementation of a straightforward quantitative technique to analyze the serials collection of the Medical Library at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC). Our simplified operations research approach resulted in a savings of nearly $1400 per year in subscriptions costs without reducing the net number of seven hundred titles or causing an imbalance in the subject distribution of our collection. By detailing both the rationale behind the process and the actual steps followed at UMKC, we hope to demonstrate that operations research techniques can be used practically and successfully even in small health sciences libraries. In the Appendix a more general and more rigorous operations research approach to the analysis of serials collections is also presented in a fashion that is, as far as possible, not mathematically forbidding.
F OR many, if not most, health sciences libraries this is a period of static or decreasing acquisitions budgets and growing demands for information services. Each year the library manager or selection committee is faced with the arduous and complex task of weighing conflicting opinions of users and staff about the importance of particular serials titles in the collection. Where the serials collection has already been trimmed to what may seem the bare bones, further deletions may seem an impossible task. To compound the problem, there are always newly published titles or titles needed to support new programs, the value of which must be balanced against that of titles already occupying shelf space. A considerable number of articles have been written from an operations research point of view
on the topic of optimally analyzing and selecting a library's serials collection [1-5]. Although published for the most part in library journals, these articles typically have been written for an audience of other operations researchers. They address the problem, but they are not very readable and seem remote from everyday library operations. Even to someone with a degree in mathematics, the nearly unrelieved succession of objective functions, decision variables, sigmas, and lambdas is tedious. As Kraft and Polacsek have noted in a recent review of the subject: The use of [operations research] decision models in biomedical libraries to date does not seem extensive. This is in part because of the lack of proper presentation and implementation of such models. These models will only be useful when reasonable solutions to real library problems can be suggested. The general procedure of model selection or creation, data gathering and analysis, and solution implementation must be demonstrated to librarians, if biomedical library operations research is to be useful in solving decision problems [1].
The operations research approach to the serials selection process described below is an attempt to bridge this gap between theory and practice. By detailing both the rationale behind the process and the actual steps followed to carry out the process in one library, we hope to demonstrate that operations research techniques can be used practically and successfully even in small health sciences libraries. OPERATIONS RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The emphasis in all operations research studies is on the development of objective, systematic, *Based on a paper presented June 14, 1978, at the Seventy-eighth annual meeting of the Medical Library and rational procedures for decision making. Basically, the writers of these studies argue that Association, Chicago, Illinois. Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978
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the selection process for library serials should involve a consistent and measurable balancing of the costs to the library and the benefits to library users. In other words, librarians should strive to derive an objective cost-benefit ratio for each title, whether it is already in the collection or being considered as a new purchase. Because a major portion of the health sciences library budget is committed to subscriptions to a relatively stable group of titles over a period of many years, and because measures of serials costs and benefits are so multifaceted and complex, it is especially important that serials selections be as beneficial and cost effective as possible. The costs of serials typically include not only the annual subscription price and initial processing, but other costs such as check-in, binding, and shelf storage space, all of which vary considerably from one title to another. The actual or potential benefits to library users of a serial title are even more complex. Rush et al. [6] have argued that benefit should be considered as a combination of three general factors, each of which can be measured in many different ways with varying degrees of success: 1) the amount of usage titles receive from patrons, 2) the relevance of particular titles to the subject interests of the patrons, and 3) the accessibility of the same information in different formats or locations. All of these aspects of cost and benefit should be taken into consideration in the selection process. But without an objective way of measuring these often conflicting cost and benefit attributes, the librarian or library selection committee must resort to isolated user or "expert" opinions and deal somehow with seemingly unrelated and conflicting measures of usage, relevance, and accessibility. The task of bringing all these considerations together in a systematic way may seem an impossible or prohibitively expensive one in terms of the personnel, expertise, and time needed to complete the analysis. It is possible and practical, however, for even the smallest one-person library to use these basic principles effectively in the serials selection process. The basic technique, stripped of its mathematical accoutrements, is not complicated. In operations research language, the process is simply to quantify and normalize selected aspects of the costs and benefits of present and potential serials subscriptions. In nontechnical language, the librarian must first select a manageable number of readily measurable aspects of cost and benefit felt to be important in determining the
398
relative worth of titles in the serials collection. These cost and benefit attributes are then all turned into weighted numbers (rank values such as 0-10, for example) on a comparable scale of magnitude and combined so as to give each title under consideration a numerical rank.* The final selection process then becomes simply a matter of working down from the highest-ranked titles until the serials acquisitions budget is exhausted. A hypothetical example may help to clarify the process. Let us say that a library selection committee studies the available data and decides that in order to effectively measure usage, three things should be considered: circulation, interlibrary loan requests, and photocopy requests. This assumes, of course, that good statistics exist for each of these serials usage attributes in the library. Further discussion and analysis convince the committee that photocopy requests are the most important indicator of usage, while circulation and ILL requests, separately considered, are of about equal importance but taken together as a usage measure are only as important as photocopying. On this basis a range of 0-8 as rank values for different volumes of photocopying (8 assigned to serials photocopied most often and 0 to those never photocopied) and a range of 0-4 for different volumes of circulation and ILL requests is established. Thus, a serial that has a high volume of photocopy, circulation, and ILL requests might have a total usage rank value of 16 (8 + 4 + 4), while a title that is never used in any of these ways would receive a usage rank of zero. Of course, most titles fall somewhere between these two extremes, depending on the level and proportion of usage measured in each of these three ways. The actual assignment of ranking values to the various attributes of cost and benefit initially will seem somewhat arbitrary. The librarian or selection committee will need to use professional judgment to decide how strong or weak the numerical weights assigned to each attribute need to be. *The authors of this article are aware that the technique described in this paper is not a cost-effectiveness analysis in a rigorous sense-rather than dividing effectiveness by cost, cost has been considered as one of several facets. Of course, if a large number of facets are considered the importance of cost can be made to appear vanishingly small, and such a simplified technique is, to that degree, dangerous. We felt, however, that the simplicity of the technique, the utility of the results, and the need to present quantitative techniques to library managers justified the presentation of a technique that, while not mathematically rigorous, is useful, functional, and easily applied and has proven fruitful in actual implementation. Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978
SYSTEMATIC SERIALS SELECTION ANALYSIS
There are no absolute guidelines for deciding how to weigh or rank one attribute in comparison with another. Rather, each librarian must make these decisions based on overall service goals and budget limitations. Operations research techniques do not provide any magical mathematical substitute for professional judgment. Rather, they are tools librarians can use to apply their professional judgment in a consistent and reproducible fashion. Numbers force us to quantify and explicate our assumptions about the relative importance of the cost-benefit attributes; they do not mean that our judgments are now mathematically precise. The rank values make it easier for us to manipulate and apply our judgments consistently. THE UMKC MEDICAL LIBRARY SITUATION The University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) Medical Library is a relatively small, urban, academic health sciences library with an active serials collection of about seven hundred titles. The library supports a School of Medicine (serving primarily students and faculty in the last four years of a six-year combined baccalaureate/M.D. program), a masters-level Graduate Nursing Program, and a large general hospital (Truman Medical Center) that serves as the teaching hospital for the School of Medicine. The Medical Library also helps to support programs of a School of Pharmacy and serves as a resource library both for a large number of affiliated teaching hospitals in the Kansas City area and for members of the Jackson County Medical Society. As one of seven branches of the UMKC library system, with centralized administration and technical services, a strong effort is made to avoid unnecessary duplication of monographic and serials titles among the branch
libraries. Acquisitions, including serials, for the Medical Library, are funded as part of the overall UMKC libraries budget. State appropriations for the last several years have been static, forcing a very careful analysis of the serials budget each year, as the forces of inflation and growing user demands combine to make scarce dollars more difficult to stretch. THE UMKC PROCEDURE In the summer of 1977, prior to the annual fall renewal of the majority of serials subscriptions, the staff of the UMKC Medical Library attempted to address in a systematic operations reBull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978
search fashion, for the first time, the problem of serials selection. We looked not only at titles already in our collection, but also at potential new titles. Rather than rank together all titles under consideration, we divided them into forty-four broad subject categories reflecting the interests of our users. In this way we attempted to balance the need to objectively weigh and rank attributes of cost, usage, relevance, and accessibility elsewhere for all titles under consideration against the equally important need to keep a well-rounded collection maintaining some depth and strength in each of the disciplines represented by our user population. This ensured that we would not inadvertently eliminate or seriously weaken one or more subject areas on the basis of "overall" numerically weighted "objective" data. Any attempt to classify a collection of books or serials, even into broad subject categories, leads to some necessarily arbitrary decisions. For example, one must place titles such as the Canadian Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology into one of two or more equally appropriate categories (physiology or pharmacology, in this case). Given greater time and resources (perhaps a computerized serials control system with space for selection analysis data elements, such as general subject headings and use statistics), it would be feasible and useful to categorize such multidisciplinary titles in two or more categories, as the National Library of Medicine does in the subject listing of the List of Journals Indexed in Index Medicus. In our case time and resource limitations prevented this more comprehensive approach. We further divided each of our forty-four subject listings into two parts: 1) titles already in our collection and 2) titles we might consider adding to our collection. We used a wide variety of sources to identify possible additions to the collection. These included: a) A ranked listing of titles used frequently by our clinical medical librarians (CMLs) to meet the information needs of our users; b) The List of Journals Indexed in Index Medicus; c) The list of journals covered by Current Contents-Clinical Practice;* d) Faculty recommendations gathered over the past year; e) Publisher's flyers and catalogs and sample journals received in the Medical Library over the past year;
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f) Statistics on titles frequently requested on of importance to us in determining the usage, relevance, and accessibility elsewhere of titles in interlibrary loan over the past year. Many of these same sources were also used to de- our library. Another library attempting to use this termine usage, relevance, and accessibility of indi- serials selection procedure would need to analyze its own service goals to determine the number, vidual titles. For every title, we gathered data on each of the kind, and relative importance of attributes most ten attributes listed in Table 1. It should be em- useful in that library. As Table 1 shows, we divided each of these atphasized that the ten attributes in this table were
TABLE 1 UMKC MEDICAL LIBRARY SERIALS COST/BENEFIT ATTRIBUTES AND WEIGHTED (RANK) VALUES ASSIGNED TO EACH TITLE
Ranges
Attributes
Rank values assigned
1) Cost per year
0-$ 20.00 $ 20.01- 50.00 50.01- 100.00 100.01- 200.00 200.01- 400.00 400.01- 800.00 over $800.00
6 5 4 3 2 l 0
2) Coverage in Index Medicus and core journal lists (such as Abridged Index Medicus, Brandon [7], and Allyn [8])
On AIM, Brandon, or Allyn lists IM full indexing IM selective indexing Not indexed in IM
7 5 2 0
3) Coverage in Current Contents-Clinical Practice*
Indexed Not indexed
2 0
4) Impact Factor from ISI's Journal Citation Reports®
10.000 or more 6.000-9.999 3.000-5.999 1.000-2.999 0.501-0.999 0.001-0.500 No Impact Factor
6 5 4 3 2 1 0
5) The CML Journal Use Frequency List of 410 Serials
Used more than 37 times (16 titles) Used 23-36 times (17 titles) Used 13-22 times (24 titles) Used 3-12 times (150 titles) Used 1-2 times (203 titles) Not ranked
6 5 4 3 2 0
6) Location at Linda Hall Library (LH-Science and Technology
In LH collection Not in LH collection
7) Location at Clendening Medical Library of Kansas University (KU) Medical Center
In KU collection Not in KU collection
0 2 0 2 0 2 4 0
8) Location at another Kansas City (union list of serials) 9) Requested on
more
area
than five times during past year
ILL
10) Individual faculty recommendations
400
library
In another collection Not in another collection In list of titles frequently requested Not in list of titles frequently requested
Strong positive recommendation Strong negative recommendation Neutral or no recommendation
+2 -2 0
Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978
SYSTEMATIC SERIALS SELECTION ANALYSIS
tributes into ranges of increasing and decreasing significance to our library and assigned simple numerical rank values to each on a scale of 0-7. Using this table we then assigned rank values to the attributes of each title on each of the forty-four lists of titles under consideration. By adding together the rank values of the ten attributes, we came up with a total rank value for each title. In theory a title could have a total rank value on our scale as high as 38, though few had ranks higher than 20. Some of the judgments and assumptions used by our staff to arrive at this list of cost-benefit attributes include the following: Cost. We limited our consideration to the obviously oversimplified subscription "cost per year" primarily because we have adequate staff and stack space at this time and because binding costs are budgeted separately and adequately by the University General Library. Thus, overhead costs are not as important a consideration for us as they may be for a library short of the staff or space necessary to cover these hidden expenses. Coverage by Index Medicus. We use this index and its computer version MEDLINE extensively
in our daily reference work. Language of publication is another attribute that we automatically considered prior to other serials attributes-our collection is almost exclusively English-language. Coverage by Current Contents-Clinical Practice®. This index accurately reflects the range of subject interests of the vast majority of the faculty and students of our School of Medicine, which emphasizes the development of clinically competent general practitioners. Institute for Scientific Information "Impact Factor." This is one of the only "objective" measures of the overall impact or importance of individual serials in the literature of science. (The Impact Factor measures the number of citations a journal receives, balanced for the number of items in each issue and the frequency of publication [9].) CML Journal Use. The UMKC CMLs provide the bulk of reference services to our users. We consider these data on journals that proved most useful in CML work to be extremely important. Location at other Kansas City libraries. We reasoned that availability in the Kansas City metropolitan area (where we have rapid, one-day courier services) would make the addition or
UMKC MEDICAL LIBRARY SERIAL SELECTION ANALYSIS WORKSHEET
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Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978
401
BYRD AND KOENIG
maintenance of a serial in our collection slightly less important. Interlibrary Loan Statistics. We did not have systematic information on the frequency with which all titles were requested on interlibrary loan. However, we did have a short list of titles frequently requested, and we gave these a relatively strong rank value. Faculty Recommendations. As we completed each subject area listing, we enlisted the aid of selected faculty specializing in that field. Unsolicited faculty recommendations were also noted here. We gave some importance to strong positive or negative recommendations from these specialists, but because of past experience with such recommendations we did not give them as strong a weight as some of the other attributes. Individuals tend to have strong likes and dislikes that do not necessarily reflect the needs or usage patterns of users as a whole. Figure I shows the form we developed to record all the information gathered for titles in each subject category. This particular form shows the titles that are already in our collection in the area of hematology, along with their costs per year and the rank values assigned to each attribute. For each subject category two of these forms were used, one for titles in the collection and one for titles being considered as additions to the collection. This part of the selection process obviously required much more staff time and effort than any other part of the process. But now that the data base of information has been compiled, the process will be greatly facilitated in future years. It will be relatively easy to update price information, to reverify holdings of other libraries, and even to consider other attributes. We also have enough information now to concentrate our analysis on those titles less highly ranked and thus still of somewhat questionable value. RESULTS At the end of the selection process, with a baseline collection of 683 active serial titles, we had canceled subscriptions to seventy-three titles (an additional four duplicate subscriptions were dropped for a total of seventy-seven cancellations) and had added eighty new titles. Thus, by systematically considering all factors we were able to actually strengthen our serials collection by seven titles while saving nearly $1400 for our book budget. The average subscription cost of canceled titles was $65.01, while new titles averaged only $45.14. The overall average cost of
402
serials in our collection was reduced slightly from $54.70/title to $52.13/title. These results and the cost savings realized are detailed in Table 2. Because many titles were closely ranked, the final decisions to delete or add titles involved some subjective professional judgments. In general, we attempted to follow the guidelines below in the final decision process: 1. To keep the collection balanced, with some strength in each subject area represented by our user population; 2. To avoid unnecessary duplication within our collection and of readily accessible collections in other libraries; 3. To keep or to add only those titles that we were relatively sure would be actively used; 4. To strive to reduce the total cost of serials subscriptions. We feel that the goals implied in these guidelines were achieved, and the results certainly justified the time and effort needed to gather the data. In two striking instances the operations research techniques forced us to critically evaluate past serials selection assumptions for the first time. Our assumption that second copies of certain titles were needed proved to be untrue in four out of ten cases. Another assumption that proved to be false concerned the "Yearbook of" titles. Rather than being the key titles we had presumed them to be, we found that they were consistently ranked at or near the bottom of each subject area. We found that even in our small, clinically oriented collection inexpensive titles were not necessarily the highest ranked (even though cost was a major component of our total rank computation), and very expensive titles were sometimes selected for addition to the collection (we even added one new title costing over $500 per year!). We also found that "standing order," "continuation," or "annual" serials were selected for cancellation almost as often as journals (thirtythree continuations canceled versus forty-four journals), and the overwhelming majority of new titles added to the collection were journals (seventy-five new journals versus five new continuations). The canceled continuations were mostly of the "Advances in," "Progress in," or "Yearbook of" variety, placing some doubt on the overall value of this kind of title in a small, patient care-oriented collection. Now that we have a useful data base of serials selection information, we hope to refine and improve our analysis in future years. The new Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978
SYSTEMATIC SERIALS SELECTION ANALYSIS TABLE 2 UMKC MEDICAL LIBRARY SERIALS SELECTION RESULTS, SUMMER 1977
Subject area Anatomy Anesthesiology Aviation and space medicine
Biochemistry Cardiovascular system Dentistry and oral surgery Dermatology Dietetics and nutrition Endocrinology Experimental medicine Gastroenterology Genetics Geriatrics Hematology Histology and cytology Hospitals Immunology Indexes, abstracts Infectious diseases, tropical medicine Library science Medical profession Medicine (general) Metabolic and allergic diseases Microbiology Miscellaneous Musculoskeletal Nervous system Nursing
Obstetrics/gynecology Ophthalmology Otorhinolaryngology Pathology Pediatrics Pharmacology/toxicology Physiology/physical medicine Psychiatry Psychology and sociology Public health Radiology Respiratory system Science, biology Surgery Urogenital Total Average subscription cost per title
No. of 1977 No. of . No. of Added No. of 1978 titles (ars titles cost titles titles cost cost 1977 (dollars) canceled added (dollars) 1978 (dollars) 8 10 1 21 25 5 6 5 12 8 12 10 6 13 6 8 9 15 8 3 14 74 7 19 8 16 23 18 15 15 7 44 14 38 17 28 18 16 18 8 21 40 12 681
938 320 35 2859 873 117 237 216 721 449 521 434 167 770 771 240 820 4669 385 189 264 1848 380 1303 463 512 1773 304 590 562 194 2251 502 2506 1755 909 545 406 885 229 1621 1229 591
2 1 0 2 3 1 1 1 2 1 1 2 1 2 1 0 3 1 1 0 2
6(2)* 0 2 2 3 5 (1)*
(M)* 1 0 4 3 3 1 2 4 1 2 0 3 2 3
93 21 0 127 148 23 22 112 66 54 40 60 S 60 322 0 377 19 60 0 113 161 0 568 409 84 610 12 33 118 0 119 56 288 87 50 100 7 210 0 152 90 134
5010 37,353 77(4)* $65.06 $54.85 Total Savings = $1398
1 1 0 1 2 1 1 2 1 0 1 0 1 1 2 1 3 0 1 1 3 7 0 3 5 3 2 5 6 2 2 3 2 4 0 2 3 0 2 1 2 1 1
80
52 20 0 570 140 20 25 200 50 0 45 0 74 35 105 20 241 0 55 .45 89 147 0 158 213 94 85 73 84 110 37 100 85 210 0 40 65 0 65 20 95 45 100
7 10 1 20 24 5 6 6 11 7 12 8 6 12 7 9 9 14 8 4 15 77 7 20 11 16 20 23 21 16 9 43 13 39 16 28 17 15 18 9 20 39 10
897 319 35 3302 865 114 240 304 705 395 526 374 236 745 554 260 684 4650 380 234 240 1834 380 893 267 522 1248 365 641 554 231 2232 531 2428 1668 899 510 399 740 249 1564 1184 557
3612 $45.15
688
35,955 $52.26
*( ) refers to number of copy 2 (duplicate) subscriptions canceled. These are included in the total figures.
Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978
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BYRD AND KOENIG
copyright legislation will force us to keep moredetailed and more-accurate records of titles frequently requested on interlibrary loan. These statistics will certainly become a major part of our analysis in the future. We also feel that it would be useful and worthwhile to attempt to give an overall rank value, using the same criteria, to entire subject areas as well as individual titles. We could do this by simply averaging the ranks of the individual titles in each subject area. This could help us to determine the relative responsiveness of our collection to the information needs of different groups of subject specialists in our user population.
6. RUSH, B.; STEINBERG, S.; AND KRAFT, D. H. Journal disposition policies. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. 25: 213-217, July-Aug. 1974. 7. BRANDON, A. N. Selected list of books and journals for the small medical library. Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 65: 191-215, Apr. 1977. 8. ALLYN, R. A library for internists II, recommended by the American College of Physicians. Ann. Int. Med. 84: 346-373, Mar. 1976. 9. GARFIELD, EUGENE. Journal Citation Reports: A Bibliometric Analysis of References Processed for the 1975 Science Citation Index. Philadelphia, Institute for Scientific Information, 1977. (Science Citation Index 1976, vol. 9.)
CONCLUSION A simplified operations research technique has been shown to yield very useful results in the analysis of the serials collection at the UMKC Medical Library. Not only were serials costs reduced, but we also feel confident that the quality and utility of the collection have been improved. For those readers who are particularly interested in the technique or in possible improvements or refinements, we have included an Appendix that describes, in what we hope is an easily comprehensible fashion, a general operations research approach that is both more flexible and conceptually tighter. The technique described above is a simplified version of that discussed in the Appendix. We hope that the reader who perseveres through the Appendix will, by seeing the relationship between the approach used in the body of the article and the more general approach described in the Appendix, be aided in visualizing other variations or applications that might be better adopted to a particular library.
APPENDIX
JOURNAL WORTH We have, as is described in the body of the article, defined JW as being composed of usage, relevance, and availability elsewhere.
REFERENCES
USAGE
1. KRAFT, D. H., ET AL. Journal selection decisions: a biomedical library operations research model; I. The framework. Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 64: 255-264, July 1976. 2. DYM, E. D.; AND SHIREY, D. L. A statistical decision model for periodical selection for a specialized information center. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. 24: 110-119, Mar.-Apr. 1973. 3. GLOVER, F. W.; AND KLINGMAN, D. Mathematical programming models and methods for the journal selection problem. Lib. Quart. 42: 43-58, Jan. 1972. 4. KRAFT, D. H.; AND HILL, T. W., JR. The journal selection problem in a university library system. Manage. Sci. 19: 613-626, Feb. 1973. _ AND . A journal selection model and 5. _ its implications for a library system. Inf. Stor. Ret. 9:1-11, Jan. 1973.
The basic concept is to take various measures of usage, to convert each measure to a 0- 10 rank, and then to assign a weight corresponding to what we feel the relative importance of each measure to be. For example, suppose that for those journals we subscribe to we have data on the number of times photocopied, the number of circulations, and the amount of reshelving done. For journals received our usage rank might be:
404
Received February 28, 1978; accepted April 11, 1978.
A GENERALIZED OPERATIONS RESEARCH APPROACH FOR THE ANALYSIS OF SERIALS COLLECTIONS The approach described in the body of the article is essentially a simplified version of more general and more mathematically rigorous approaches that have been frequently described in operations research literature. For those interested in applying or extending the approach described in the body of this article, it may be very useful to read the following description of a more general approach. The basic concept is simply to define a rank for each title by dividing some measure of journal worth (JW) by cost (C). That is rank (R) = JW/C. Given a finite amount of money to spend on journal subscriptions, our decision rule becomes very simple. We simply subscribe to the journal with the highest cost-benefit ratio, that is, R, and keep on going until we run out of budget money.
Ur
=
2PR
+
2Cr 5
+
lSr
Ur = usage rank Pr = photocopy rank Cr = circulation rank Sr = shelving rank
-if we assume that the photocopy measure and the circulations measure are of equal importance (each has a weight of 2) and the reshelving measure perhaps half as important (a weight of 1). We divide by 5 (the sum of Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978
SYSTEMATIC SERIALS SELECTION ANALYSIS the weights = 2 + 2 + 1) to normalize the usage rank, that is, to restore it to the 0-10 scale. The weights used are, of course, at the discretion of the librarian; those used here are for purposes of illustration only. The individual ranks-photocopy, circulation, and so on-are assigned as in the body of the article. There are other measures of usage that might be used: the number of people on routing lists, the number of times ajournal has been cited in publications authored by staff in one's institution, and so forth. For journals not subscribed to the number of ILL requests serves as a good measure of usage: Ur = ILLr ILLr = interlibrary loan rank
tion patterns. One can obtain a consensus from a few experts as to what are the half dozen or so absolute core journals in a field and then use the Journal Citation Reports® to see what other journals are cited and to what extent. These data can then be normalized to provide a very useful and informative relevance weight. Journal Citation Reports® is also the source of the Impact Factor discussed in the body of this article. An additional technique, suggested by Kraft et al. [see ref. 1 above], is to use the hits from on-line searches to define relevance to the library's users. That is, the journals appearing in the hit results of on-line searches can be ranked and normalized to provide one measure of relevance to the user community (although the real usefulness of the citations retrieved should also be considered). If the library provides current-awareness or SDI searches, the resulting hits can be treated in the same way. Many of these techniques-evaluation of on-line searches and SDI searches, the use of the Journal Citation Reports®, Current Contents®, and so on-have the distinct advantage that they are based on a universe of information and possible journal titles much larger than what the user is exposed to in the typical library. Now we have various normalized measures of relevance. As above, we weigh our assessment of the importance or validity of these different measures, multiply by the new weights, and divide by the sum of these new weights; what emerges is a normalized relevance rank. For purposes of illustration let us assume that we have Journal Citation Reports®X data and search hit data and that we will also use the list of titles selected from an appropriate section of Current Contents® as an independent authority list. A formula for the relevance rank might appear as below:
We now have a normalized usage factor for both inhouse journals and journals not subscribed to. This illustrates why we "normalized" by the sum of the weights-that is, divided by 5-in computing the usage rank for journals received. Normalizing makes it possible to compare usage ranks for journals received and journals not received. A discussion of how to derive rank scores for ILL request rates is appropriate. The now-classic paper by Gordon Williams et al. [1] suggests that if material is requested from the same title six or more times in one year, a library would be economically better off subscribing to that journal.* Let us assume, therefore, that if a title is requested six times in a year it should be in the collection. We might also assume that if it is requested just six times it is marginal-it is certainly in the ideal collection, but it is not one of the star performers. Now, if we assume that the usage of a typical journal in the collection ought to be about 5 on the 0-10 scale, then a title that ought to be in the collection, but just barely qualifies, ought to rank somewhere between 0-5. Let us say that six interlibrary loan requests a year equals 2.5 on our zero to ten scale. Now we at least have a base point; in fact, we have two base points: zero, because it makes sense that a zero request Rr rate equals the zero point on the scale; and six requests CCr is, as we have just determined, 2.5 points. What about Hr the scale above 2.5? There is no absolute for that; it de- JCRr pends on the library context, and the librarian must simply use good judgment.
RELEVANCE Relevance can be measured in a number of different ways. Published lists of what constitutes the core journal literature of a specific field are available [see refs. 7, 8 above]. Such external expert judgment can be converted to relevance weights. Another variation of the same approach would be to use a publication like Current Contents®, which, within the various subject areas covered by different editions, attempts to assemble the most-important journals. Another very interesting way to come up with relevance weights would be to use ISI's Journal Citation Reports® [see ref. 9 above]. These reports, which are part of the Science Citation Index® and which can also be purchased separately, trace journal-to-journal cita*The similarity between that figure and the CONTU guidelines relating to the 1976 copyright legislation is probably not coincidental. Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978
Rr
= = = =
=
ICCr
+
3Hr + 2JCRr 6
relevance rank Current ContentsR rank hit rank Journal Citation Reports® rank
ACCESSIBILITY ELSEWHERE
Here we can start by listing nearby libraries that give us substantially better access to their journal material than we could get through normal interlibrary loan or document provision service channels. For each of these libraries we define some value, again on the familiar 0-10 scale, that represents the convenience and the quality of the service the other libraries provide us. Conventional interlibrary loan would be zero, and another library within the same parent organization that will promptly deliver something by messenger is perhaps 10. For each journal that we subscribe to or that we might consider subscribing to, we check whether it is on the holdings list of any of these libraries. If it is, it receives a rank of 1, if not, a zero. All ones are multiplied by the ease-of-access score mentioned above (if a title is held by more than one of the libraries considered, we use the highest ease-of-access score). This will give us an ease-of-access score for each title; the only problem is that it runs the wrong way-those titles held elsewhere locally can be more safely dispensed with in
405
BYRD AND KOENIG our library, and we wish them to have the lowest scores. the dollar, that does not have to be normalized. A dollar This we can correct simply by subtracting the score of subscription costs has the same value as a dollar of binding costs. Here we do not have to worry about norfrom 10: malizing and weighting; we simply add up the appropriate costs for each title. Ar = 10 - (EA x H) Ar = accessibility rank EA = ease of access H = held: yes = I;no = 0 Now we have three different scores-usage, relevance, and ease of access elsewhere-to evaluate the worth of subscribing to a journal. To obtain one score for JW, we need only to assign comparative weights to the component values. Let us say, for example, that we give usage a score of 3, relevance a score of 2, and ease of access a score of 1: JW = 3Ur + 2Rr + lAr COST
Now we have the effectiveness half of the costeffectiveness figures. The effectiveness half is almost always the hardest half to quantify, and this case is no exception. The costs are relatively straightforward. Subscription costs are obvious. Acquisitions and processing costs are a little more complicated. A weekly journal requires greater processing expenditures than a quarterly. One might simply want to use average costs for accessioning and processing, or one may wish to be a bit more sophisticated and make a distinction between fixed and variable costs in the accessioning and processing function. Similarly, binding costs and space costs vary with the size of the item. Costs, of course, have the great advantage of being expressed in a constant unit,
406
COST EFFECTIVENESS To arrive at a cost-effectiveness ratio we simply divide the effectiveness (worth) by the cost:
relative cost effectiveness of a journal =
Cw
This result ranks each journal by its cost effectiveness. The above discussion is intended as an exposition of a generalizable technique applicable in most library situations. Few libraries will have all the data mentioned above, but all will have some. There will certainly be other pertinent data that we have not discussed. Application of the technique need not be on so elaborate a scale-our aim was to demonstrate a technique that can be readily modified to fit the context of a real-life situation. The application described in the article proper is such a modification. We hope that other librarians will make similar use of these techniques. REFERENCE
1. WILLIAMS, GORDON R., ET AL. Library Cost Models: Owning versus Borrowing Serial Publications. Washington, D.C., National Science Foundation, Office of Science Information Service, 1968. (NTIS Pub. No. PB 182304.)
Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978
MICHAEL E. D. KOENIG, Director ofDevelopment Institutefor Scientific Information Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ABSTRACT This paper describes the implementation of a straightforward quantitative technique to analyze the serials collection of the Medical Library at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC). Our simplified operations research approach resulted in a savings of nearly $1400 per year in subscriptions costs without reducing the net number of seven hundred titles or causing an imbalance in the subject distribution of our collection. By detailing both the rationale behind the process and the actual steps followed at UMKC, we hope to demonstrate that operations research techniques can be used practically and successfully even in small health sciences libraries. In the Appendix a more general and more rigorous operations research approach to the analysis of serials collections is also presented in a fashion that is, as far as possible, not mathematically forbidding.
F OR many, if not most, health sciences libraries this is a period of static or decreasing acquisitions budgets and growing demands for information services. Each year the library manager or selection committee is faced with the arduous and complex task of weighing conflicting opinions of users and staff about the importance of particular serials titles in the collection. Where the serials collection has already been trimmed to what may seem the bare bones, further deletions may seem an impossible task. To compound the problem, there are always newly published titles or titles needed to support new programs, the value of which must be balanced against that of titles already occupying shelf space. A considerable number of articles have been written from an operations research point of view
on the topic of optimally analyzing and selecting a library's serials collection [1-5]. Although published for the most part in library journals, these articles typically have been written for an audience of other operations researchers. They address the problem, but they are not very readable and seem remote from everyday library operations. Even to someone with a degree in mathematics, the nearly unrelieved succession of objective functions, decision variables, sigmas, and lambdas is tedious. As Kraft and Polacsek have noted in a recent review of the subject: The use of [operations research] decision models in biomedical libraries to date does not seem extensive. This is in part because of the lack of proper presentation and implementation of such models. These models will only be useful when reasonable solutions to real library problems can be suggested. The general procedure of model selection or creation, data gathering and analysis, and solution implementation must be demonstrated to librarians, if biomedical library operations research is to be useful in solving decision problems [1].
The operations research approach to the serials selection process described below is an attempt to bridge this gap between theory and practice. By detailing both the rationale behind the process and the actual steps followed to carry out the process in one library, we hope to demonstrate that operations research techniques can be used practically and successfully even in small health sciences libraries. OPERATIONS RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The emphasis in all operations research studies is on the development of objective, systematic, *Based on a paper presented June 14, 1978, at the Seventy-eighth annual meeting of the Medical Library and rational procedures for decision making. Basically, the writers of these studies argue that Association, Chicago, Illinois. Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978
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BYRD AND KOENIG
the selection process for library serials should involve a consistent and measurable balancing of the costs to the library and the benefits to library users. In other words, librarians should strive to derive an objective cost-benefit ratio for each title, whether it is already in the collection or being considered as a new purchase. Because a major portion of the health sciences library budget is committed to subscriptions to a relatively stable group of titles over a period of many years, and because measures of serials costs and benefits are so multifaceted and complex, it is especially important that serials selections be as beneficial and cost effective as possible. The costs of serials typically include not only the annual subscription price and initial processing, but other costs such as check-in, binding, and shelf storage space, all of which vary considerably from one title to another. The actual or potential benefits to library users of a serial title are even more complex. Rush et al. [6] have argued that benefit should be considered as a combination of three general factors, each of which can be measured in many different ways with varying degrees of success: 1) the amount of usage titles receive from patrons, 2) the relevance of particular titles to the subject interests of the patrons, and 3) the accessibility of the same information in different formats or locations. All of these aspects of cost and benefit should be taken into consideration in the selection process. But without an objective way of measuring these often conflicting cost and benefit attributes, the librarian or library selection committee must resort to isolated user or "expert" opinions and deal somehow with seemingly unrelated and conflicting measures of usage, relevance, and accessibility. The task of bringing all these considerations together in a systematic way may seem an impossible or prohibitively expensive one in terms of the personnel, expertise, and time needed to complete the analysis. It is possible and practical, however, for even the smallest one-person library to use these basic principles effectively in the serials selection process. The basic technique, stripped of its mathematical accoutrements, is not complicated. In operations research language, the process is simply to quantify and normalize selected aspects of the costs and benefits of present and potential serials subscriptions. In nontechnical language, the librarian must first select a manageable number of readily measurable aspects of cost and benefit felt to be important in determining the
398
relative worth of titles in the serials collection. These cost and benefit attributes are then all turned into weighted numbers (rank values such as 0-10, for example) on a comparable scale of magnitude and combined so as to give each title under consideration a numerical rank.* The final selection process then becomes simply a matter of working down from the highest-ranked titles until the serials acquisitions budget is exhausted. A hypothetical example may help to clarify the process. Let us say that a library selection committee studies the available data and decides that in order to effectively measure usage, three things should be considered: circulation, interlibrary loan requests, and photocopy requests. This assumes, of course, that good statistics exist for each of these serials usage attributes in the library. Further discussion and analysis convince the committee that photocopy requests are the most important indicator of usage, while circulation and ILL requests, separately considered, are of about equal importance but taken together as a usage measure are only as important as photocopying. On this basis a range of 0-8 as rank values for different volumes of photocopying (8 assigned to serials photocopied most often and 0 to those never photocopied) and a range of 0-4 for different volumes of circulation and ILL requests is established. Thus, a serial that has a high volume of photocopy, circulation, and ILL requests might have a total usage rank value of 16 (8 + 4 + 4), while a title that is never used in any of these ways would receive a usage rank of zero. Of course, most titles fall somewhere between these two extremes, depending on the level and proportion of usage measured in each of these three ways. The actual assignment of ranking values to the various attributes of cost and benefit initially will seem somewhat arbitrary. The librarian or selection committee will need to use professional judgment to decide how strong or weak the numerical weights assigned to each attribute need to be. *The authors of this article are aware that the technique described in this paper is not a cost-effectiveness analysis in a rigorous sense-rather than dividing effectiveness by cost, cost has been considered as one of several facets. Of course, if a large number of facets are considered the importance of cost can be made to appear vanishingly small, and such a simplified technique is, to that degree, dangerous. We felt, however, that the simplicity of the technique, the utility of the results, and the need to present quantitative techniques to library managers justified the presentation of a technique that, while not mathematically rigorous, is useful, functional, and easily applied and has proven fruitful in actual implementation. Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978
SYSTEMATIC SERIALS SELECTION ANALYSIS
There are no absolute guidelines for deciding how to weigh or rank one attribute in comparison with another. Rather, each librarian must make these decisions based on overall service goals and budget limitations. Operations research techniques do not provide any magical mathematical substitute for professional judgment. Rather, they are tools librarians can use to apply their professional judgment in a consistent and reproducible fashion. Numbers force us to quantify and explicate our assumptions about the relative importance of the cost-benefit attributes; they do not mean that our judgments are now mathematically precise. The rank values make it easier for us to manipulate and apply our judgments consistently. THE UMKC MEDICAL LIBRARY SITUATION The University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) Medical Library is a relatively small, urban, academic health sciences library with an active serials collection of about seven hundred titles. The library supports a School of Medicine (serving primarily students and faculty in the last four years of a six-year combined baccalaureate/M.D. program), a masters-level Graduate Nursing Program, and a large general hospital (Truman Medical Center) that serves as the teaching hospital for the School of Medicine. The Medical Library also helps to support programs of a School of Pharmacy and serves as a resource library both for a large number of affiliated teaching hospitals in the Kansas City area and for members of the Jackson County Medical Society. As one of seven branches of the UMKC library system, with centralized administration and technical services, a strong effort is made to avoid unnecessary duplication of monographic and serials titles among the branch
libraries. Acquisitions, including serials, for the Medical Library, are funded as part of the overall UMKC libraries budget. State appropriations for the last several years have been static, forcing a very careful analysis of the serials budget each year, as the forces of inflation and growing user demands combine to make scarce dollars more difficult to stretch. THE UMKC PROCEDURE In the summer of 1977, prior to the annual fall renewal of the majority of serials subscriptions, the staff of the UMKC Medical Library attempted to address in a systematic operations reBull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978
search fashion, for the first time, the problem of serials selection. We looked not only at titles already in our collection, but also at potential new titles. Rather than rank together all titles under consideration, we divided them into forty-four broad subject categories reflecting the interests of our users. In this way we attempted to balance the need to objectively weigh and rank attributes of cost, usage, relevance, and accessibility elsewhere for all titles under consideration against the equally important need to keep a well-rounded collection maintaining some depth and strength in each of the disciplines represented by our user population. This ensured that we would not inadvertently eliminate or seriously weaken one or more subject areas on the basis of "overall" numerically weighted "objective" data. Any attempt to classify a collection of books or serials, even into broad subject categories, leads to some necessarily arbitrary decisions. For example, one must place titles such as the Canadian Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology into one of two or more equally appropriate categories (physiology or pharmacology, in this case). Given greater time and resources (perhaps a computerized serials control system with space for selection analysis data elements, such as general subject headings and use statistics), it would be feasible and useful to categorize such multidisciplinary titles in two or more categories, as the National Library of Medicine does in the subject listing of the List of Journals Indexed in Index Medicus. In our case time and resource limitations prevented this more comprehensive approach. We further divided each of our forty-four subject listings into two parts: 1) titles already in our collection and 2) titles we might consider adding to our collection. We used a wide variety of sources to identify possible additions to the collection. These included: a) A ranked listing of titles used frequently by our clinical medical librarians (CMLs) to meet the information needs of our users; b) The List of Journals Indexed in Index Medicus; c) The list of journals covered by Current Contents-Clinical Practice;* d) Faculty recommendations gathered over the past year; e) Publisher's flyers and catalogs and sample journals received in the Medical Library over the past year;
399
BYRD AND KOENIG
f) Statistics on titles frequently requested on of importance to us in determining the usage, relevance, and accessibility elsewhere of titles in interlibrary loan over the past year. Many of these same sources were also used to de- our library. Another library attempting to use this termine usage, relevance, and accessibility of indi- serials selection procedure would need to analyze its own service goals to determine the number, vidual titles. For every title, we gathered data on each of the kind, and relative importance of attributes most ten attributes listed in Table 1. It should be em- useful in that library. As Table 1 shows, we divided each of these atphasized that the ten attributes in this table were
TABLE 1 UMKC MEDICAL LIBRARY SERIALS COST/BENEFIT ATTRIBUTES AND WEIGHTED (RANK) VALUES ASSIGNED TO EACH TITLE
Ranges
Attributes
Rank values assigned
1) Cost per year
0-$ 20.00 $ 20.01- 50.00 50.01- 100.00 100.01- 200.00 200.01- 400.00 400.01- 800.00 over $800.00
6 5 4 3 2 l 0
2) Coverage in Index Medicus and core journal lists (such as Abridged Index Medicus, Brandon [7], and Allyn [8])
On AIM, Brandon, or Allyn lists IM full indexing IM selective indexing Not indexed in IM
7 5 2 0
3) Coverage in Current Contents-Clinical Practice*
Indexed Not indexed
2 0
4) Impact Factor from ISI's Journal Citation Reports®
10.000 or more 6.000-9.999 3.000-5.999 1.000-2.999 0.501-0.999 0.001-0.500 No Impact Factor
6 5 4 3 2 1 0
5) The CML Journal Use Frequency List of 410 Serials
Used more than 37 times (16 titles) Used 23-36 times (17 titles) Used 13-22 times (24 titles) Used 3-12 times (150 titles) Used 1-2 times (203 titles) Not ranked
6 5 4 3 2 0
6) Location at Linda Hall Library (LH-Science and Technology
In LH collection Not in LH collection
7) Location at Clendening Medical Library of Kansas University (KU) Medical Center
In KU collection Not in KU collection
0 2 0 2 0 2 4 0
8) Location at another Kansas City (union list of serials) 9) Requested on
more
area
than five times during past year
ILL
10) Individual faculty recommendations
400
library
In another collection Not in another collection In list of titles frequently requested Not in list of titles frequently requested
Strong positive recommendation Strong negative recommendation Neutral or no recommendation
+2 -2 0
Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978
SYSTEMATIC SERIALS SELECTION ANALYSIS
tributes into ranges of increasing and decreasing significance to our library and assigned simple numerical rank values to each on a scale of 0-7. Using this table we then assigned rank values to the attributes of each title on each of the forty-four lists of titles under consideration. By adding together the rank values of the ten attributes, we came up with a total rank value for each title. In theory a title could have a total rank value on our scale as high as 38, though few had ranks higher than 20. Some of the judgments and assumptions used by our staff to arrive at this list of cost-benefit attributes include the following: Cost. We limited our consideration to the obviously oversimplified subscription "cost per year" primarily because we have adequate staff and stack space at this time and because binding costs are budgeted separately and adequately by the University General Library. Thus, overhead costs are not as important a consideration for us as they may be for a library short of the staff or space necessary to cover these hidden expenses. Coverage by Index Medicus. We use this index and its computer version MEDLINE extensively
in our daily reference work. Language of publication is another attribute that we automatically considered prior to other serials attributes-our collection is almost exclusively English-language. Coverage by Current Contents-Clinical Practice®. This index accurately reflects the range of subject interests of the vast majority of the faculty and students of our School of Medicine, which emphasizes the development of clinically competent general practitioners. Institute for Scientific Information "Impact Factor." This is one of the only "objective" measures of the overall impact or importance of individual serials in the literature of science. (The Impact Factor measures the number of citations a journal receives, balanced for the number of items in each issue and the frequency of publication [9].) CML Journal Use. The UMKC CMLs provide the bulk of reference services to our users. We consider these data on journals that proved most useful in CML work to be extremely important. Location at other Kansas City libraries. We reasoned that availability in the Kansas City metropolitan area (where we have rapid, one-day courier services) would make the addition or
UMKC MEDICAL LIBRARY SERIAL SELECTION ANALYSIS WORKSHEET
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NOTES:
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FIG. I.-UMKC Medical Library Serials Selection Analysis Worksheet.
Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978
401
BYRD AND KOENIG
maintenance of a serial in our collection slightly less important. Interlibrary Loan Statistics. We did not have systematic information on the frequency with which all titles were requested on interlibrary loan. However, we did have a short list of titles frequently requested, and we gave these a relatively strong rank value. Faculty Recommendations. As we completed each subject area listing, we enlisted the aid of selected faculty specializing in that field. Unsolicited faculty recommendations were also noted here. We gave some importance to strong positive or negative recommendations from these specialists, but because of past experience with such recommendations we did not give them as strong a weight as some of the other attributes. Individuals tend to have strong likes and dislikes that do not necessarily reflect the needs or usage patterns of users as a whole. Figure I shows the form we developed to record all the information gathered for titles in each subject category. This particular form shows the titles that are already in our collection in the area of hematology, along with their costs per year and the rank values assigned to each attribute. For each subject category two of these forms were used, one for titles in the collection and one for titles being considered as additions to the collection. This part of the selection process obviously required much more staff time and effort than any other part of the process. But now that the data base of information has been compiled, the process will be greatly facilitated in future years. It will be relatively easy to update price information, to reverify holdings of other libraries, and even to consider other attributes. We also have enough information now to concentrate our analysis on those titles less highly ranked and thus still of somewhat questionable value. RESULTS At the end of the selection process, with a baseline collection of 683 active serial titles, we had canceled subscriptions to seventy-three titles (an additional four duplicate subscriptions were dropped for a total of seventy-seven cancellations) and had added eighty new titles. Thus, by systematically considering all factors we were able to actually strengthen our serials collection by seven titles while saving nearly $1400 for our book budget. The average subscription cost of canceled titles was $65.01, while new titles averaged only $45.14. The overall average cost of
402
serials in our collection was reduced slightly from $54.70/title to $52.13/title. These results and the cost savings realized are detailed in Table 2. Because many titles were closely ranked, the final decisions to delete or add titles involved some subjective professional judgments. In general, we attempted to follow the guidelines below in the final decision process: 1. To keep the collection balanced, with some strength in each subject area represented by our user population; 2. To avoid unnecessary duplication within our collection and of readily accessible collections in other libraries; 3. To keep or to add only those titles that we were relatively sure would be actively used; 4. To strive to reduce the total cost of serials subscriptions. We feel that the goals implied in these guidelines were achieved, and the results certainly justified the time and effort needed to gather the data. In two striking instances the operations research techniques forced us to critically evaluate past serials selection assumptions for the first time. Our assumption that second copies of certain titles were needed proved to be untrue in four out of ten cases. Another assumption that proved to be false concerned the "Yearbook of" titles. Rather than being the key titles we had presumed them to be, we found that they were consistently ranked at or near the bottom of each subject area. We found that even in our small, clinically oriented collection inexpensive titles were not necessarily the highest ranked (even though cost was a major component of our total rank computation), and very expensive titles were sometimes selected for addition to the collection (we even added one new title costing over $500 per year!). We also found that "standing order," "continuation," or "annual" serials were selected for cancellation almost as often as journals (thirtythree continuations canceled versus forty-four journals), and the overwhelming majority of new titles added to the collection were journals (seventy-five new journals versus five new continuations). The canceled continuations were mostly of the "Advances in," "Progress in," or "Yearbook of" variety, placing some doubt on the overall value of this kind of title in a small, patient care-oriented collection. Now that we have a useful data base of serials selection information, we hope to refine and improve our analysis in future years. The new Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978
SYSTEMATIC SERIALS SELECTION ANALYSIS TABLE 2 UMKC MEDICAL LIBRARY SERIALS SELECTION RESULTS, SUMMER 1977
Subject area Anatomy Anesthesiology Aviation and space medicine
Biochemistry Cardiovascular system Dentistry and oral surgery Dermatology Dietetics and nutrition Endocrinology Experimental medicine Gastroenterology Genetics Geriatrics Hematology Histology and cytology Hospitals Immunology Indexes, abstracts Infectious diseases, tropical medicine Library science Medical profession Medicine (general) Metabolic and allergic diseases Microbiology Miscellaneous Musculoskeletal Nervous system Nursing
Obstetrics/gynecology Ophthalmology Otorhinolaryngology Pathology Pediatrics Pharmacology/toxicology Physiology/physical medicine Psychiatry Psychology and sociology Public health Radiology Respiratory system Science, biology Surgery Urogenital Total Average subscription cost per title
No. of 1977 No. of . No. of Added No. of 1978 titles (ars titles cost titles titles cost cost 1977 (dollars) canceled added (dollars) 1978 (dollars) 8 10 1 21 25 5 6 5 12 8 12 10 6 13 6 8 9 15 8 3 14 74 7 19 8 16 23 18 15 15 7 44 14 38 17 28 18 16 18 8 21 40 12 681
938 320 35 2859 873 117 237 216 721 449 521 434 167 770 771 240 820 4669 385 189 264 1848 380 1303 463 512 1773 304 590 562 194 2251 502 2506 1755 909 545 406 885 229 1621 1229 591
2 1 0 2 3 1 1 1 2 1 1 2 1 2 1 0 3 1 1 0 2
6(2)* 0 2 2 3 5 (1)*
(M)* 1 0 4 3 3 1 2 4 1 2 0 3 2 3
93 21 0 127 148 23 22 112 66 54 40 60 S 60 322 0 377 19 60 0 113 161 0 568 409 84 610 12 33 118 0 119 56 288 87 50 100 7 210 0 152 90 134
5010 37,353 77(4)* $65.06 $54.85 Total Savings = $1398
1 1 0 1 2 1 1 2 1 0 1 0 1 1 2 1 3 0 1 1 3 7 0 3 5 3 2 5 6 2 2 3 2 4 0 2 3 0 2 1 2 1 1
80
52 20 0 570 140 20 25 200 50 0 45 0 74 35 105 20 241 0 55 .45 89 147 0 158 213 94 85 73 84 110 37 100 85 210 0 40 65 0 65 20 95 45 100
7 10 1 20 24 5 6 6 11 7 12 8 6 12 7 9 9 14 8 4 15 77 7 20 11 16 20 23 21 16 9 43 13 39 16 28 17 15 18 9 20 39 10
897 319 35 3302 865 114 240 304 705 395 526 374 236 745 554 260 684 4650 380 234 240 1834 380 893 267 522 1248 365 641 554 231 2232 531 2428 1668 899 510 399 740 249 1564 1184 557
3612 $45.15
688
35,955 $52.26
*( ) refers to number of copy 2 (duplicate) subscriptions canceled. These are included in the total figures.
Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978
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copyright legislation will force us to keep moredetailed and more-accurate records of titles frequently requested on interlibrary loan. These statistics will certainly become a major part of our analysis in the future. We also feel that it would be useful and worthwhile to attempt to give an overall rank value, using the same criteria, to entire subject areas as well as individual titles. We could do this by simply averaging the ranks of the individual titles in each subject area. This could help us to determine the relative responsiveness of our collection to the information needs of different groups of subject specialists in our user population.
6. RUSH, B.; STEINBERG, S.; AND KRAFT, D. H. Journal disposition policies. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. 25: 213-217, July-Aug. 1974. 7. BRANDON, A. N. Selected list of books and journals for the small medical library. Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 65: 191-215, Apr. 1977. 8. ALLYN, R. A library for internists II, recommended by the American College of Physicians. Ann. Int. Med. 84: 346-373, Mar. 1976. 9. GARFIELD, EUGENE. Journal Citation Reports: A Bibliometric Analysis of References Processed for the 1975 Science Citation Index. Philadelphia, Institute for Scientific Information, 1977. (Science Citation Index 1976, vol. 9.)
CONCLUSION A simplified operations research technique has been shown to yield very useful results in the analysis of the serials collection at the UMKC Medical Library. Not only were serials costs reduced, but we also feel confident that the quality and utility of the collection have been improved. For those readers who are particularly interested in the technique or in possible improvements or refinements, we have included an Appendix that describes, in what we hope is an easily comprehensible fashion, a general operations research approach that is both more flexible and conceptually tighter. The technique described above is a simplified version of that discussed in the Appendix. We hope that the reader who perseveres through the Appendix will, by seeing the relationship between the approach used in the body of the article and the more general approach described in the Appendix, be aided in visualizing other variations or applications that might be better adopted to a particular library.
APPENDIX
JOURNAL WORTH We have, as is described in the body of the article, defined JW as being composed of usage, relevance, and availability elsewhere.
REFERENCES
USAGE
1. KRAFT, D. H., ET AL. Journal selection decisions: a biomedical library operations research model; I. The framework. Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 64: 255-264, July 1976. 2. DYM, E. D.; AND SHIREY, D. L. A statistical decision model for periodical selection for a specialized information center. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. 24: 110-119, Mar.-Apr. 1973. 3. GLOVER, F. W.; AND KLINGMAN, D. Mathematical programming models and methods for the journal selection problem. Lib. Quart. 42: 43-58, Jan. 1972. 4. KRAFT, D. H.; AND HILL, T. W., JR. The journal selection problem in a university library system. Manage. Sci. 19: 613-626, Feb. 1973. _ AND . A journal selection model and 5. _ its implications for a library system. Inf. Stor. Ret. 9:1-11, Jan. 1973.
The basic concept is to take various measures of usage, to convert each measure to a 0- 10 rank, and then to assign a weight corresponding to what we feel the relative importance of each measure to be. For example, suppose that for those journals we subscribe to we have data on the number of times photocopied, the number of circulations, and the amount of reshelving done. For journals received our usage rank might be:
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Received February 28, 1978; accepted April 11, 1978.
A GENERALIZED OPERATIONS RESEARCH APPROACH FOR THE ANALYSIS OF SERIALS COLLECTIONS The approach described in the body of the article is essentially a simplified version of more general and more mathematically rigorous approaches that have been frequently described in operations research literature. For those interested in applying or extending the approach described in the body of this article, it may be very useful to read the following description of a more general approach. The basic concept is simply to define a rank for each title by dividing some measure of journal worth (JW) by cost (C). That is rank (R) = JW/C. Given a finite amount of money to spend on journal subscriptions, our decision rule becomes very simple. We simply subscribe to the journal with the highest cost-benefit ratio, that is, R, and keep on going until we run out of budget money.
Ur
=
2PR
+
2Cr 5
+
lSr
Ur = usage rank Pr = photocopy rank Cr = circulation rank Sr = shelving rank
-if we assume that the photocopy measure and the circulations measure are of equal importance (each has a weight of 2) and the reshelving measure perhaps half as important (a weight of 1). We divide by 5 (the sum of Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978
SYSTEMATIC SERIALS SELECTION ANALYSIS the weights = 2 + 2 + 1) to normalize the usage rank, that is, to restore it to the 0-10 scale. The weights used are, of course, at the discretion of the librarian; those used here are for purposes of illustration only. The individual ranks-photocopy, circulation, and so on-are assigned as in the body of the article. There are other measures of usage that might be used: the number of people on routing lists, the number of times ajournal has been cited in publications authored by staff in one's institution, and so forth. For journals not subscribed to the number of ILL requests serves as a good measure of usage: Ur = ILLr ILLr = interlibrary loan rank
tion patterns. One can obtain a consensus from a few experts as to what are the half dozen or so absolute core journals in a field and then use the Journal Citation Reports® to see what other journals are cited and to what extent. These data can then be normalized to provide a very useful and informative relevance weight. Journal Citation Reports® is also the source of the Impact Factor discussed in the body of this article. An additional technique, suggested by Kraft et al. [see ref. 1 above], is to use the hits from on-line searches to define relevance to the library's users. That is, the journals appearing in the hit results of on-line searches can be ranked and normalized to provide one measure of relevance to the user community (although the real usefulness of the citations retrieved should also be considered). If the library provides current-awareness or SDI searches, the resulting hits can be treated in the same way. Many of these techniques-evaluation of on-line searches and SDI searches, the use of the Journal Citation Reports®, Current Contents®, and so on-have the distinct advantage that they are based on a universe of information and possible journal titles much larger than what the user is exposed to in the typical library. Now we have various normalized measures of relevance. As above, we weigh our assessment of the importance or validity of these different measures, multiply by the new weights, and divide by the sum of these new weights; what emerges is a normalized relevance rank. For purposes of illustration let us assume that we have Journal Citation Reports®X data and search hit data and that we will also use the list of titles selected from an appropriate section of Current Contents® as an independent authority list. A formula for the relevance rank might appear as below:
We now have a normalized usage factor for both inhouse journals and journals not subscribed to. This illustrates why we "normalized" by the sum of the weights-that is, divided by 5-in computing the usage rank for journals received. Normalizing makes it possible to compare usage ranks for journals received and journals not received. A discussion of how to derive rank scores for ILL request rates is appropriate. The now-classic paper by Gordon Williams et al. [1] suggests that if material is requested from the same title six or more times in one year, a library would be economically better off subscribing to that journal.* Let us assume, therefore, that if a title is requested six times in a year it should be in the collection. We might also assume that if it is requested just six times it is marginal-it is certainly in the ideal collection, but it is not one of the star performers. Now, if we assume that the usage of a typical journal in the collection ought to be about 5 on the 0-10 scale, then a title that ought to be in the collection, but just barely qualifies, ought to rank somewhere between 0-5. Let us say that six interlibrary loan requests a year equals 2.5 on our zero to ten scale. Now we at least have a base point; in fact, we have two base points: zero, because it makes sense that a zero request Rr rate equals the zero point on the scale; and six requests CCr is, as we have just determined, 2.5 points. What about Hr the scale above 2.5? There is no absolute for that; it de- JCRr pends on the library context, and the librarian must simply use good judgment.
RELEVANCE Relevance can be measured in a number of different ways. Published lists of what constitutes the core journal literature of a specific field are available [see refs. 7, 8 above]. Such external expert judgment can be converted to relevance weights. Another variation of the same approach would be to use a publication like Current Contents®, which, within the various subject areas covered by different editions, attempts to assemble the most-important journals. Another very interesting way to come up with relevance weights would be to use ISI's Journal Citation Reports® [see ref. 9 above]. These reports, which are part of the Science Citation Index® and which can also be purchased separately, trace journal-to-journal cita*The similarity between that figure and the CONTU guidelines relating to the 1976 copyright legislation is probably not coincidental. Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978
Rr
= = = =
=
ICCr
+
3Hr + 2JCRr 6
relevance rank Current ContentsR rank hit rank Journal Citation Reports® rank
ACCESSIBILITY ELSEWHERE
Here we can start by listing nearby libraries that give us substantially better access to their journal material than we could get through normal interlibrary loan or document provision service channels. For each of these libraries we define some value, again on the familiar 0-10 scale, that represents the convenience and the quality of the service the other libraries provide us. Conventional interlibrary loan would be zero, and another library within the same parent organization that will promptly deliver something by messenger is perhaps 10. For each journal that we subscribe to or that we might consider subscribing to, we check whether it is on the holdings list of any of these libraries. If it is, it receives a rank of 1, if not, a zero. All ones are multiplied by the ease-of-access score mentioned above (if a title is held by more than one of the libraries considered, we use the highest ease-of-access score). This will give us an ease-of-access score for each title; the only problem is that it runs the wrong way-those titles held elsewhere locally can be more safely dispensed with in
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BYRD AND KOENIG our library, and we wish them to have the lowest scores. the dollar, that does not have to be normalized. A dollar This we can correct simply by subtracting the score of subscription costs has the same value as a dollar of binding costs. Here we do not have to worry about norfrom 10: malizing and weighting; we simply add up the appropriate costs for each title. Ar = 10 - (EA x H) Ar = accessibility rank EA = ease of access H = held: yes = I;no = 0 Now we have three different scores-usage, relevance, and ease of access elsewhere-to evaluate the worth of subscribing to a journal. To obtain one score for JW, we need only to assign comparative weights to the component values. Let us say, for example, that we give usage a score of 3, relevance a score of 2, and ease of access a score of 1: JW = 3Ur + 2Rr + lAr COST
Now we have the effectiveness half of the costeffectiveness figures. The effectiveness half is almost always the hardest half to quantify, and this case is no exception. The costs are relatively straightforward. Subscription costs are obvious. Acquisitions and processing costs are a little more complicated. A weekly journal requires greater processing expenditures than a quarterly. One might simply want to use average costs for accessioning and processing, or one may wish to be a bit more sophisticated and make a distinction between fixed and variable costs in the accessioning and processing function. Similarly, binding costs and space costs vary with the size of the item. Costs, of course, have the great advantage of being expressed in a constant unit,
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COST EFFECTIVENESS To arrive at a cost-effectiveness ratio we simply divide the effectiveness (worth) by the cost:
relative cost effectiveness of a journal =
Cw
This result ranks each journal by its cost effectiveness. The above discussion is intended as an exposition of a generalizable technique applicable in most library situations. Few libraries will have all the data mentioned above, but all will have some. There will certainly be other pertinent data that we have not discussed. Application of the technique need not be on so elaborate a scale-our aim was to demonstrate a technique that can be readily modified to fit the context of a real-life situation. The application described in the article proper is such a modification. We hope that other librarians will make similar use of these techniques. REFERENCE
1. WILLIAMS, GORDON R., ET AL. Library Cost Models: Owning versus Borrowing Serial Publications. Washington, D.C., National Science Foundation, Office of Science Information Service, 1968. (NTIS Pub. No. PB 182304.)
Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 66(4) October 1978
