Serials Collection Management in Recessionary Times

Strategic planning, collaboration, continual stewardship, best practices, and re-engineering can provide librarians with a toolkit of innovative strategies that meets the worst of economic times with bold, persistent experimentation.

This book covers the implications for libraries of a broad range of technological and economic challenges. These challenges include the fallout from the global economic crisis, the positioning of usage statistics, the advent of open access scholarship, database management, responding to budgetary constrictions and general access to serials.

Taken as a whole, this collection provides practitioners in the library sector and in higher education with a wide variety of insights on the strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities involved with serials collection management in recessionary times, written by academic librarians, vendors, publishers, fundraisers, and higher education professionals.

This book was published as a special issue of The Serials Librarian.

Karen G. Lawson is the Associate Dean of Collections and Technical Services at the Iowa State University Library in Ames, IA, USA. She has written numerous articles on the subject of librarianship.