The Confusing World of Popular Periodical Access
I was helping a professor last week with a perennial problem: how to provide students access to content in popular periodicals like newspapers and magazines without confusing them with a dizzying array of library access points.
This is a core role1 of subject librarians. We call it “discovery”: helping patrons navigate our wide array of resources to find and access sources. We can answer specific needs by creating and sharing a document or a course guide, adding material to a research guide, visiting a class, meeting individually or in small groups, and of course there’s the research help desk in O’Neill, Ask-a-Librarian and 24/7 Online chat, and service desks in all the special libraries. Additionally, we can take advantage of new options in our search tools as they become available.
We Suggest
While searching for a title in our holdings recently, you might have run across a “We suggest” highlighted entry at the top of your search results. That’s one way that librarians are trying to expedite discovery. But what is it, how did it get there, and why is it necessary? I’ll answer those questions in reverse order.
Why does it have to be so confusing that we need assistance?
Caveat: as a colleague recently said to me, “I can explain it to you, but I’m not sure I can make it make sense.” Most of the morass can be explained with these 4 reasons:
- Title changes: Case in point (more below): the titles The Atlantic and Atlantic Monthly played tug-of-war throughout the 20th Century, and earlier versions changed formats as they merged with Putnam’s Magazine, The Critic, and other publications. Librarians preserve these distinctions because researchers need them.
- Format changes: Most periodicals have variously been in print, microfilm, and electronic versions of various types. When we purchase these items, records often come to us prepackaged from the vendor, and are troublesome to merge into single catalog entries, both for technical reasons and because of cataloging practices (see #1).
- Subscription v. Purchase: Once upon a time a subscription meant our patrons would have perpetual access to print journals on our shelves. Now a subscription is electronic and means our patrons have access only while the subscription is kept current. To contract “perpetual access,” we purchase it, which is expensive up-front, but far more economical in the long run.
- Patchwork Quilt: We’re never sure what future deals might arrive (and experience tells us prices only increase), so we purchase perpetual access whenever funds allow; often these deals are through database companies, and don’t necessarily cover the full run of a periodical plus current content, and may be in a variety of forms, from transcribed html to scanned pdf’s to web-native. So, we do what we can to assemble full access through a patchwork quilt of overlapping database content.
How do librarians resolve the confusion we had a part in creating? Here’s a case in point:
Case Study: The Atlantic
Confusing results
An ordinary journal search in the catalog for “atlantic” turns up 173 entries, because “atlantic” is a common word that appears in many other publications. (For another challenge, find Time: over 200 results!) One can narrow results by searching its parent company “atlantic monthly” in quotation marks (13 results, 8 of which are the publication). But that still leaves you 8 entries to search for the access you need. Without library intervention, that can be tedious and frustrating.
Untangling results: “We suggest”
Fortunately, the company that provides our catalog search recently created a tool for highlighting certain search results. If you clicked that search link above, you’ll notice a “we suggest” result right at the top. That’s not automatic; a lot of librarians all over the world advocated for a tool that the company finally provided, and that our systems department then activated. A number of librarians here at BC have recommended some items to highlight, and our systems department added them. (Before this article was posted, Time was added.)
Can’t we just subscribe to get full access?
For several years, some faculty members had been advocating for direct access to The Atlantic’s current issues and archive to help resolve this confusion. Last year BC Libraries was able to negotiate a 5-year fixed price for an annual institutional subscription. It’s a significant expense, and one that means that money can’t be redirected to other subscriptions; just simplifying access wouldn’t have justified it.
Simplicity v. Access
As noted above, we prefer to purchase access (most often through database companies), which creates big up-front costs but saves money in the long run. What justified subscribing was getting access that we didn’t otherwise have. The Atlantic (like The New Yorker and many other popular periodicals) is putting more and more of its content online in forms that they don’t license to database companies. Without subscribing, we wouldn’t be able to provide access to those growing areas of content.
Your part
When you see a suggested record, use it! We’ve expended labor and funds to make it easier for you. And if you’re encountering a confusing welter of results looking for something you think should be simple, let us know. We’ll help you find what you’re looking for, and investigate and try to find a way to make our records less confusing.
- We do much more, of course, which is the “Value Beyond Discovery” part of BC Libraries’ mission. Given our birds’-eye-view of the publishing landscape, we can suggest related tools to help researchers broaden perspectives, connect you with other staff to start dialogues about innovative methods and tools, and help students think critically about what gets published and saved and why, among other things. ↩︎
