Strategic planning, collaboration, continual stewardship, best practices, and re-engineering can provide librarians with a toolkit of innovative strategies that meets the worst of economic times with bold, persistent experimentation.

This book covers the implications for libraries of a broad range of technological and economic challenges. These challenges include the fallout from the global economic crisis, the positioning of usage statistics, the advent of open access scholarship, database management, responding to budgetary constrictions and general access to serials.

Taken as a whole, this collection provides practitioners in the library sector and in higher education with a wide variety of insights on the strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities involved with serials collection management in recessionary times, written by academic librarians, vendors, publishers, fundraisers, and higher education professionals.

This book was published as a special issue of The Serials Librarian.

Contents

1. Introduction: Serials Collection Management in Recessionary Times: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats Karen G. Lawson 2. The Global Economic Crisis: What Libraries and Publishers Can Do and Are Doing Karen Hunter and Robert Bruning 3. Evaluating Usage and Impact of Networked Electronic Resources through Point-of-Use Surveys: a MINES for Libraries Study Martha Kyrillidou, Terry Plum and Bruce Thompson 4. A Steep Part of the Landscape: Serials, Libraries, and the Challenges Faced by Higher Education Patricia Maloney 5. Open Access Journals in College Library Collections William H. Walters 6. Shared Digital Access and Preservation Strategies for Serials at the Center for Research Libraries Bernard F. Reilly and James Simon 7. The Paper Divide Wayne Pedersen 8. A Reprise, Or Round Three: Using a Database Management Program as a Decision Support System for the Cancellation of Serials Judith M. Nixon 9. Assessing Your Vendors’ Viability VKay Williams and Kathy Downes 10. All In This Together: a Subscription Vendor’s View Allen Powell, Kittie Henderson and John Lumsden 11. So Poor We Can’t Even Pay Attention: Identifying Important Serials for Political Science During the Great Recession Edward Goedeken 12. Managing Resources to Maximize Serials Access: The Case of the Small Liberal Arts College Susan H. Zappen 13. Raising the Library Profile to Fight Budget Challenges Lynda James-Gilboe 14. Thinking Outside of the Box: Fundraising During Economic Downturns Carolyn Taylor 15. The View from the UK: the Economic Crisis and Serials Acquisitions on an Offshore Island Tony Kidd

Author Bio

Karen G. Lawson is the Associate Dean of Collections and Technical Services at the Iowa State University Library in Ames, IA, USA. She has written numerous articles on the subject of librarianship.