Abstract
Foreign‐language journals are an essential component of interdisciplinary area studies collections at research libraries but are, by definition, low‐use materials. Librarians who select them seek to broaden these collections, reduce duplication, and enable shared access to them. The challenge is lack of article‐level discoverability: these are print‐only journals, not covered in online indexing/abstracting services. If users cannot discover these articles, then how can cooperating libraries share them, and distribute responsibility for collecting them, which is essential to coordinated collection development?
The SALToC project collaboratively address this issue by creating simple, centrally browsable tables of contents for target journals, through a low‐tech, low‐cost distributed process that benefits users at all participating libraries. For journals not available online nor included in article databases or indexes, this kind of discovery facilitates research by enabling scholars to use previously undiscoverable holdings of other libraries: they can now issue interlibrary loan, document delivery, and/or offsite retrieval requests, with full citations for desired articles. (Many libraries provide article document delivery, if the requester has a citation). Coordinated collection development (via planned reduction of duplication coupled with broader collective coverage) becomes supportable in the research library community only when shared access (and its prerequisite—discovery) is provided. The South Asian Language Journals Table of Contents (SALToC) project represents a proof‐of‐concept demonstration of the value of this approach. This paper shows how simple, "grass‐roots" distributed efforts can contribute significantly to discoverability of hard to discover resources, thereby making coordinated collection development cost‐effective, popular among users, and sustainable.
Included in
Library and Information Science Commons, South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies Commons
Cooperative Collection Development Requires Access: SALToC—A Low‐Tech, High‐Value Distributed Online Project for Article‐Level Discovery in Foreign‐Language Print‐Only Journals
Foreign‐language journals are an essential component of interdisciplinary area studies collections at research libraries but are, by definition, low‐use materials. Librarians who select them seek to broaden these collections, reduce duplication, and enable shared access to them. The challenge is lack of article‐level discoverability: these are print‐only journals, not covered in online indexing/abstracting services. If users cannot discover these articles, then how can cooperating libraries share them, and distribute responsibility for collecting them, which is essential to coordinated collection development?
The SALToC project collaboratively address this issue by creating simple, centrally browsable tables of contents for target journals, through a low‐tech, low‐cost distributed process that benefits users at all participating libraries. For journals not available online nor included in article databases or indexes, this kind of discovery facilitates research by enabling scholars to use previously undiscoverable holdings of other libraries: they can now issue interlibrary loan, document delivery, and/or offsite retrieval requests, with full citations for desired articles. (Many libraries provide article document delivery, if the requester has a citation). Coordinated collection development (via planned reduction of duplication coupled with broader collective coverage) becomes supportable in the research library community only when shared access (and its prerequisite—discovery) is provided. The South Asian Language Journals Table of Contents (SALToC) project represents a proof‐of‐concept demonstration of the value of this approach. This paper shows how simple, "grass‐roots" distributed efforts can contribute significantly to discoverability of hard to discover resources, thereby making coordinated collection development cost‐effective, popular among users, and sustainable.