The last few years have brought two major developments that have impacted the Psychology Department. One was the creation of the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, which shares not only some subject interests, but also some faculty members. The other development was the hiring of faculty members whose research and teaching center on social psychology. This has been a new direction for Brown and for what the Library needs to do to support Psychology.
The Library's Collection Development Policy was written in the early 1980s. I have discussed this issue (social psychology) with the heads of Collection Development and of Acquisitions. They have helped me adjust the Approval Plan to largely meet the new demands for monographs.
As usual, the problem I have is with the journal literature. The demand develops this way. The social psychology courses have large enrollments, the students use PsycLIT for researching their papers, and that stimulates a large demand for journals we do not own. I see that from the undergraduate level, but there would be the same trend for the graduate students. We have not adjusted our journal collection as we did our monographs. Our solution has been massive use of interlibrary loan. A future solution may involve electronic journal subscriptions. The following journal titles are ones requested on ILL many, many times each year.*
- Journal of Adolescence
- Journal of Adolescent Health
- Journal of Adolescent Health Care
- Journal of Adolescent Research
- Journal of Youth and Adolescence
- Health Psychology
- Journal of School Health
- Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology
- Psychological Medicine
- Child Abuse and Neglect - just ordered with other funds
- American Journal of Community Psychology
The main electronic bibliographic tools for topics within psychology are PsycLIT and MEDLINE. PsycLIT indexes over 1300 journals back to 1974. MEDLINE covers 3800 journals and contains records back to 1966.
Titles held: 17,616
Current serials: 175
| Library Support | 1993/94 | 1994/95 | 1995/96 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Line Item Allocation | $3,631 | $2,804 | $3,019 |
| Approval Support | 7,000 | 9,000 | 7,488 |
| Serials | 29,458 | 31,222 | 36,570 |
| Total Support | $40,089 | $43,026 | $47,077 |
STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES
Our collection in the physiological side of psychology has the benefit of mutual collecting interests with Neuroscience, Biology, Medicine, and Cognitive Science. The journal collection in social psychology has not kept up.
*[ The Library tries to balance the cost of interlibrary loan/document delivery and subscriptions. The costs of the former are beginning to rise as publishers demand higher copyright fees for reproducing their articles. If articles from a particular journal are requested frequently, we may decide that a subscription is more cost-efficient, as well as more convenient to the users. It is important to point out that interlibrary loan/document delivery is not free, although the Library does not pass on the cost to faculty and students. --W. S. Monroe]
Frank Kellerman, Reference Librarian and Selector for Psychology
Department of Psychology
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