Polk Library News
March 2007 - Issue 36

From the Director: Periodical Review 2007 Pat Wilkinson, wilkinso@uwosh.edu

Below is the text of a memo that I recently sent to deans, department chairs and departmental or college Library representatives.

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Periodical Review 2007
Patrick Wilkinson, Director of Polk Library

The goals of Polk Library's Periodical Review 2007 are twofold:

• to discontinue a sufficient number of less-needed print journal titles to stay within the library's material budget for 2007/08
• to expand, if possible, the number of high-quality, peer-reviewed journals available online for student and faculty research.

To meet these goals, the Library needs to evaluate its current collection and restructure its budget. The staff of Polk Library requests your help and asks for your response no later than April 9, 2007.

What Your College or Department Needs to Do By April 9

Attached is a list of the print journal subscriptions currently supporting your college or department curriculum. This list has an “X” next to titles proposed for cancellation and gives the journal's cost, percent assigned to your department, total use observed from three studies, and full-text availability. The journals proposed for cancellation generally had low comparative use, high overall cost, a high cost per use ratio, or full-text available online.

Your department or college is specifically requested to respond to the proposed cancellations in light of current and future curricular trends, accreditation needs and other relevant information known to your department or college. To assist in your evaluation, we have attached a list of relevant titles with full text currently available online.

In addition to commenting on proposed cancellations, you may recommend the acquisition of new journal titles or online options. Please note that any new titles added would need to be done in the context of an overall reduction in the number of titles that the library receives.

All comments on the proposed cancellations or requests to add a new title must come officially from the department chair. In Business Administration, Education and Human Services, and Nursing, the library asks that the comments come officially from the chair of the college library committee or dean, whichever is most appropriate for the college. These official responses should be sent to Ron Hardy, Polk Library's Head of Information Resources, no later than April 9, 2007.

Final decisions for cancellations and new subscriptions will rest with Polk Library. If a department or college does not respond by April 9, Polk Library will assume that the titles proposed for cancellation can be cancelled without further departmental or college comment.

During this process, Ron Hardy and I are happy to talk with colleges, departments, the Faculty Senate and individual faculty about the Periodical Review 2007 in general or about specific titles. Please feel free to contact us.

Background

The challenges that the library's materials budget faces are clear. Polk Library's total materials budget was $944,978 in 2001/02 and is $888,227 for 2006/07. This represents a decline in real dollars of $56,751. In addition, based on a conservative estimate of price increases of 6% a year, the purchasing power of our materials budget has declined approximately $330,000 since 2001.

In response to these challenges, the staff of the library has worked with faculty on how best to allocate its funds to provide educational and research material. Working together, we have already cancelled less-needed print journals, reference materials, online databases and microforms. We have reduced the amount of content that the library provides in multiple formats.

To minimize the impact of the necessary cancellations of print resources, Polk Library has expanded the number of periodical and journal titles available online to 15,420. It established the Ingenta Table of Contents service that covers over 30,000 publications. This service allows you to get the current table of contents of important journals or trade publications e-mailed to you, often before they physically arrive in libraries. Now, journal articles from other libraries are routinely delivered to your computer desktop in 3 to 5 days. If necessary, the library will purchase an article and deliver it to your desktop in less than 48 hours. In addition to Interlibrary Loan for books and videos, Universal Borrowing allows you to directly checkout materials from other UW libraries.

The Library would now like to take advantage of some of the new opportunities to expand the number of high-quality, peer-reviewed journals online. For example, the library currently subscribes to Academic Search Elite. This online service provides access to 1,500 full-text, peer-reviewed journals and is heavily used. If the library can restructure its budgets in this periodical review, it could upgrade this service to provide double or triple this number of peer-reviewed journals covering a wide range of academic disciplines. The trend is for students and faculty to look for information online; in 2005/06, there were approximately 800,000 uses of the library's online databases.

Based on the library's best budget projections for 2007/08, the library faces a shortfall of over $125,000 in its collection budgets. This projection assumes a flat budget and a 6% to 12% increase in the cost of journals, databases, etc. The library will need to make decisions by mid-May so the changes can be implemented for 2007/08.

Guidelines for Decisions

After April 9, Polk Library will review comments and make final cancellation and addition decisions using the following guidelines. All ten guidelines below will be used for cancellation decisions. The last eight guidelines will be used for addition decisions.

• The publication has received low use in the use studies.
• The publication has a high cost per use.
• The publication is indexed in an index owned or licensed by the library.
• The publication fills an information need not covered by other titles.
• The publication is expected to support student research.
• The publication directly supports the department's curriculum.
• The publication is available from the library online in full text or full image. See http://qh9xe5ap4v.search.serialssolutions.com/ for a list of journals that are available online.
• The publication is reasonably priced, and its publisher does not have a history of inordinate annual price increases.
• The publication is owned by another library within UW System.
• The publication is available through interlibrary loan or document delivery.

Final Decisions

Final decisions will be communicated to colleges and departments by mid-May. Cancellation decisions must be made in May so that savings will occur in the 2007/08 fiscal year.

Thank you for your cooperation and input. And I would like to repeat that Ron Hardy and I would be happy to talk with you or attend a meeting. Please feel free to contact us.

Name Changes for Government Search Engines Mike Watkins, watkins@uwosh.edu

The two major search engines used for searching the internet for government documents have recently undergone name changes. Both search engines are useful in locating full text government documents from the United States government and from individual state governments within the United States.

Last summer, the search engine formerly known as Google UncleSam became Google U.S. Government. The website for this search engine can be found at http://www.google.com/ig/usgov. The search engine did not undergo any substantial changes, although the search page now has links to news releases and government information currently in the news.

In the middle of January of this year, the government documents search engine formerly known as FirstGov.gov became USA.gov . USA.gov is the official portal for access to online United States federal documents. The web address for this search engine is http://www.usa.gov/. A Spanish language version of the web search engine is also available at http://www.usa.gov/gobiernousa/.

The easiest way to locate a full text version of a document using these search engines is to type the title of the document into the search template surrounded by quotes. It's best not to include an initial article of a title (a, an, the) in the search as this might prolong the time to complete the search.

When perusing the results of the search it is sometimes helpful to scan the web urls of the results list and look for one ending in pdf, which indicates that this is a full text portable document format. It is important to note however that full text information can also appear in html and other formats.

Last semester, a UW Oshkosh faculty member doing research in Antarctica was in desperate need of some journal articles that were nowhere to be found online. Since he was many miles away and wasn't able to commute to campus anytime soon, he certainly qualified for Polk Library's Off Campus Article Delivery Service – and was delighted to receive the articles he needed, scanned and delivered to his email.

This service, offered to all students, faculty, and staff who do not regularly commute to campus, provides access via email or fax to articles that are not full-text on the library website, but only available in print copies in the building. Many students in online or off-campus programs have also taken advantage of this service to get articles delivered to their email in Sheboygan, Madison, Neillsville, Minnesota, and even Idaho. If you teach a class where your students don't regularly commute to the Oshkosh campus, or if you will be researching away from campus for an extended period of time, remember – Polk Library is happy to keep you connected to the research you need. Contact Renée Büker, Outreach Services Librarian, at x7331 or bukerr@uwosh.edu for more information.

Tax Forms Available At Polk Library Mike Watkins, watkins@uwosh.edu

Polk Library has Federal and Wisconsin State tax forms available for distribution to faculty, staff, students, and the general public. The forms are located outside of the entrance to the Government Documents room on third floor south of the library building.

Currently, the library has the following federal tax forms available for distribution:

• 1040 EZ
• 1040 A
• 1040
• Schedule A & B
• Schedule C
• Schedule D
• Schedule R
• Schedule SE
• 8863

We have ordered but not yet received:

• 1040 NR
• 1040 NR-EZ

Polk library is no longer part of the BPOL (Banks, Post Offices and Libraries) network; therefore we no longer receive instruction booklets for federal tax forms. However, instructions and other federal forms can also be accessed and printed out online at: http://www.irs.gov/formspubs/index.html?portlet=3

Polk Library has the following Wisconsin tax forms and instructions available:

• Instructions, Form 1
• Form 1
• Instructions, Form 1A, WI-Z and Telefile
• Form 1A
• Form WI-Z
• Instructions, Form INPR
• Form 1NPR
• Instructions and Form H & H-EZ ( Homestead Credit)

Wisconsin tax forms can also be accessed and printed out online at: http://www.dor.state.wi.us/html/formpub.html

Women in History - New Historical Fiction in the Browsing Room Karen Reiter, reiter@uwosh.edu

Historical fiction gets the personal touch with these new novels written from the point of view of women in history. Helen of Troy takes the reader inside the mind of the legendary beauty, while the other books below give personas to a virtually unknown explorer, two queens in way over their “heads”, a Roman governor's wife, and a handful of European royals.

Did you know that Henry VIII's fifth wife, Katherine Howard, usually is depicted as stupid and promiscuous, but that she was really a poorly educated teen out of her league? Claudia, Pontius Pilate's wife, was forbidden from attending the crucifixion of Jesus. Marie Antoinette, the queen of France, did not say, “Let them eat cake!”, but she did love to party, at least early in her reign. Check out one of these new books and discover the stories about these famous women.

Helen of Troy, by Margaret George

Ines of My Soul, by Isabel Allende

Boleyn Inheritance, by Philippa Gregory

Pilate's Wife, by Antoinette May

Spring Break Hours Jeanne Foley, foley@uwosh.edu

Building Hours

Reference Service

Wisconsin Area Research Center and University Archives

Spotlight on Reference Renée Büker, bukerr@uwosh.edu

Encyclopedia of Television
Ref. PN 1992.18 .E53 2004 v.1-4

For a scholarly treatment of a sometimes not-so-scholarly medium, the four-volume Encyclopedia of Television is a good starting point. Students and researchers can find background information about specific shows, from 60 Minutes to The Simpsons ; biographical information about actors and news broadcasters; and historical information about topics such as “Wildlife and Nature Programs” or “Teenagers and Television in the United States ”. Each entry includes a “Further Reading” section with references to scholarly journals, such as Studies in Popular Culture or Feminist Media Studies; trade journals, such as Broadcasting & Cable or Variety; and many scholarly books written on the television medium.

Staff Highlights

• Patrick Wilkinson, Polk Library Director, chaired the meeting of the OCLC Task Force on the Integration of E-Books in Quebec City on February 5, 2007. The Task Force is charged to "investigate best models and practices for integrating e-books...into the basic services of libraries for the benefit of library users worldwide." Below is a photo from the meeting.
  
• Polk Library welcomes Mary Schneider as the new library Financial Specialist. Mary was previously the Accounts Payable Financial Specialist for Taycheedah Correctional Institution. Mary says, "Working in the library with everyone is such a refreshing change from the prison system" and notes that she is "amazed at how many cat lovers there are" among Polk Library staff. (See the photos of Polk Library pets for an example of just how many there are...)