The Middlebury Libraries now have full access to Philosophical Psychology, an international journal devoted to philosophy and the psychological sciences. Our online holdings now include 1997 to the most current issues. From the journal’s website:

Emphasis is placed on articles concerned with cognitive and perceptual processes, models of psychological processing, including neural network and dynamical systems models, and relations between psychological theories and accounts of neural underpinnnings or environmental context. The journal also publishes theoretical articles concerned with the nature and history of psychology, the philosophy of science as applied to psychology, and explorations of the underlying issues — theoretical and ethical — in contemporary educational, clinical, occupational and health psychology.

Philosophical Psychology is fully indexed through 2000 via Summon (go/Summon) and also available through Proquest Psychology (1997-2000). The most recent issues are available directly through Taylor & Francis, the publisher of Philosophical Psychology (1997- current).

I’m therefore pleased to announce that the name for this area is now Research and Collection Services (RCS). While many portions of the website still reflect the old names — and it will take a while before we’ve eradicated all remnants of Collection Management/Academic Consulting Services from the website, email distribution lists, HR/Banner information, etc. — please consider the name to be effective immediately.  We’ll try to get the changes made expeditiously.

As a reminder, RCS includes:

• Reference and Instruction Librarians
• Special Collections
• Vt. Collection
• Government Documents
• Inter-library Loan
• Cataloging/Acquisitions/Serials
• Preservation & Processing
• Collection Development

The most stable and permanent situation is when we have a subscription with the publisher to a specific journal or packaged group of journals (e.g. Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Taylor & Francis).  In this case we have guaranteed permanent access to all material published during the years of our subscription.  Often we will also have access to a backfile of material published before our subscription started.  In some cases we are assured continuing access to this backfile, while in other cases ongoing access to any material dating from before the start of our subscription is not guaranteed.

We have deals with some of our larger commercial publishers (e.g. Elsevier Science Direct, Sage Premier, Springer SpringerLink), generally with contract periods of two to four years, under which we maintain electronic subscriptions to the journals we used to subscribe to in print, and we are allowed access to a large group of additional journals for a very low package price. We have the same guaranteed permanent access for our subscribed titles as for any other subscriptions.  We do not, however, acquire permanent access rights to titles in the low-cost “bonus” package; we have access to these titles only for the duration of the package deal.  These deals are commonly renewed for subsequent terms, so we will usually retain access to the bonus titles for an extended period.  However, sometimes the roster of journals in the package will change somewhat upon renewal of the deal, so we will gain access to new titles, but we may lose access to some titles we formerly had.  Occasionally a title in the bonus package will vanish in the middle of the term, but we have no recourse since there are no guarantees of access for the individual non-subscribed titles.

Our access to many journals and newspapers is not directly with the publishers, but rather through subscriptions to aggregated full-text databases (e.g. Academic OneFile, Ethnic NewsWatch, Lexis-Nexis Academic).  The vendors of the aggregations license content from the publishers, and these arrangements sometimes change; new titles are added from time to time, but others are deleted.  So, we may find that a title or titles we have counted on, or that portions of the content of a title, have suddenly vanished.  Since we have no direct relationship with the publishers of the original material, we acquire no ownership rights, and if something is pulled from the database, we are simply out of luck.  And in the most drastic situation, if we cancel our subscription to one of these databases, no matter how long we have subscribed our access to everything ends immediately,  One exception to the impermanence of aggregated content is archival databases (e.g. British Periodicals Collection, JSTOR, ProQuest Historical Newspapers), for which we have purchased perpetual access to material covering a certain period of time.

In addition to the resources we pay for, we facilitate access to many free and open-access publications, as a service to our users.  Obviously, since the providers are furnishing this material to all at no cost, there are no guarantees of availability or permanence.  We have no standing with the providers, so we are not in a position to request that problems be resolved.

First, the definition of the question took some untangling. Does this mean current subscriptions? Does it mean individual subscriptions that we choose specifically to receive, or does it count the titles we receive as part of “big deals” from vendors like Elsevier? Does it mean stuff we pay cold hard cash for, or does it include freebies, such as the 4000+ open access journals that are readily accessible on the web (and which are all included in the library catalog)? Or does it mean just the print stuff we receive in hard copy?

After some hemming & hawing, I decided the most interesting questions were: 1) how many journal titles do we have access to altogether, both current & ceased? and 2) how many journal titles do we currently subscribe to, regardless of format, regardless of cost?

With help from the cataloging, acquisitions, and serials departments, I discovered that:
1) we currently have access to an astounding total of approximately 42,443 journal titles; and
2) of these, approximately 38,000 are current.

Furthermore, about 5,100+ are print titles (current & ceased) and we have free web access to about 4,300+ titles from the Directory of Open Access. Catalog records for all of these titles are in MIDCAT.

This is an incredible resource for our students and faculty (and staff!), and many thanks to all the people — acquisitions & collection development folks, catalogers, systems people, infrastructure people, librarian liaisons & selectors, etc. etc. — who have worked hard over the years to make this possible. And this is just one small part of the many many many services LIS provides. Really amazing.

As part of the ongoing integration process with Middlebury, we have been looking at our respective internal work flows in technical services where need to be aligned.  

Since the fall of 2008, the MIIS Acquisitions Librarian, Erika Johnson (erika.johnson@miis.edu), has been using Blackwell and its Collection Manager as one of  the primary book vendors.  As a result, a majority of our recent book orders have being placed via Blackwell Library Services.

Beginning with the Spring 2009 semester, Erika  is also handling all of our serials responsibilities.  In addition to overseeing the purchasing, cancellation, invoicing, receipt, processing, and shelving of print periodicals and journals (including check-in, claiming, and binding), she now also manages the authentication, activation and maintenance of access to electronic journals through EBSCO’s A-to-Z list and electronic journals service (EJS).