LISNews: Librarian News

A preprint of an article that will appear in the forthcoming issue of portal: Libraries and the Academy:

This paper identifies core journals in the life sciences for Cornell University researchers by analyzing the frequency of Cornell-authored citations in Biosis Previews between 1996 and 2001. The distribution frequency of journals confirms Bradford’s Law of Scatter or the 80/20 Rule. The top 240 journals, providing 80% of the citations, were analyzed by publisher type and institutional subscription price. In general, journals from society and associations received the highest number of citations and were priced considerably lower than commercial journals. The methodology described is a fast, no-cost, and scalable procedure that can be adapted to various subject databases, and may be used to provide guidance on which titles to purchase for electronic access.

Thanks to the Free Online Scholarship Newsletter.

Jan Bissett and Margi Heinen write...

\"It\'s been a slow journey. Okay, we\'ll admit it. It started with curiosity and collection development. With most everyone examining print collections for web replacements, often with a critical eye on dates, coverage and duplication, even reference collections are being questioned. And there\'s really no need to keep that SIC Manual, is there? It\'s over ten years old and it\'s been replaced with the NAICS, so can\'t we use that shelf space for something else, or better yet, use the web? And the answer is, of course, yes and no.\" more... from LLRX.

The Minnesota Daily
reports on the impact of journal subscription price increases on the University of Minnesota\'s libraries:

\"We\'re getting killed by price increases\" across all scientific and engineering fields, said University of Minnesota librarian Tom Shaughnessy. The gap between technical journal price increases of 10 percent each year and inflationary budget increases of only 3 percent leads to cutbacks in the number of journals, he said. Since 1995-96, University libraries have cut nearly 450 technical journals -- nearly one in five -- to keep up.

[via New Pages and Excite News]

Frank Rich reports in the New York Times that porn is not only big business, it\'s part of mainstream American entertainment.

As one person put it, \"We realized that when there are 700 million porn rentals a year, it can\'t just be a million perverts renting 700 videos each.\"

Collection development librarians, take note.