Research Project to Study Electronic Journal Usage

UCLA participates in electronic journal usage study

During 2001 and 2002, the University of California libraries will be participating in a research project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The goal of this project is to determine user responses to relying on digital access to selected journals, print holdings of which will be relocated to remote storage during the project. The study will test the hypothesis that effectively shared digital resources can begin to relieve the pressures on physical facilities and capital budgets to house and manage print materials.

For more information about this initiative, see http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/url/periodicals/index1.htm. The project is expected to be of critical importance to all of UC’s libraries as we develop strategies, policies, and programs for managing research library collections of print and digital materials. In addition, we expect that the project’s outcomes will also be of considerable interest to academic and research library communities nationwide.

Each journal selected for the project will be evaluated on two UC campuses. On one campus ("experimental"), the journal will be temporarily relocated to remote storage for the duration of the project. Journals will only be relocated for which full digital versions are available. Use levels of the digital versions of relocated journals will be monitored during the project. Users who need to consult print holdings of relocated journals may request a volume or a photocopy from storage. Use levels of these volumes will likewise be monitored in order to allow project staff to evaluate the total levels of use (digital and print) for a particular journal relocated during the project.

On the second campus ("control"), the journal will remain on the library’s shelves. Use levels for the non-relocated journal will likewise be monitored during the project. This will allow project staff to compare usage when both print and digital versions of the same journal are available to library users. For example, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, v. 252–355, housed on the Santa Barbara campus, will be relocated to storage during the study. Digital and print use of these volumes will be recorded. The same volumes of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London on the Berkeley campus will remain on library shelves; use of these volumes during the study will also be recorded.

Selected journals from the UCLA campus will be in storage from October 1, 2001, until September 30, 2002. In addition to usage data (e.g., every instance of re-shelving a print title or every request for a print volume relocated to storage), we will be surveying users who request that a print volume be returned from storage in order to ascertain what it was about the digital version that did not meet their needs.

The Biomedical Library will be the experimental library for the following titles. Print volumes of these titles will be stored in the SRLF and will be available for paging. Electronic access to these titles will continue as usual.

Animal Behavior
Antiviral Research
Biological Psychology
Brain Research Bulletin
Conservation Biology
Current Opinion in Cell Biology
International Journal of Cancer
Journal of NeuroscienceResearch

We will act as the control library for the following titles. Print volumes of these journals will remain in our stacks. These titles are also available electronically.

American Journal of Cardiology
Annals of Epidemiology
Gene
Journal of Neuroimmunology
Research in Nursing & Health

If you have any questions or concerns about this project, please do let us know. Mike Randall, the UCLA Collection Management Initiative project coordinator, can be reached at 310-206-7813 or via e-mail at mhr@library.ucla.edu.

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