Search results

Principles of online bibliographic information retrieval, and some practical work with major search systems, was offered as a component of a course dealing with information resources for university students in science and engineering at the University of California. As part of this program each student performed a search on a topic of his own choice and presented an oral report to the class on that search. Student reactions and attitudes are discussed, and some of the problems which emerged are described. The relevance to student needs of the online component of the course is also presented.

During the last ten years, the number of research‐level serials has grown rapidly, and serials costs have increased at an even faster rate. These events, coupled with other inflationary pressures and nearly static or declining budgets, forced academic research libraries to shift collections‐funding patterns significantly. As a result, they repeatedly reduced their support of monograph‐rich collections in order to pay for a series of unexpectedly large cost increases in serial‐rich collections. Despite such stopgap fund transfers, serials costs often outstripped their increased allotments. Cancellation of serial acquisitions, serials ordering moratoria, buy‐one‐cancel‐one policies, and other assorted roadblocks or holding actions frequently resulted in a qualitative decline in serial‐rich collections, yet seldom prevented the publication of new serials or the continued increases in prices. Acknowledging the notoriety of this problem among research librarians, I call it “the serials problem.”