Lis-e-Journals Survey Results - 15th May 2008

Bev Acreman, Marketing Officer, UKSG and Taylor & Francis 

We regularly review lis-e-journals to make sure it is still working for all parts of the UKSG’s community – see www.uksg.org/about for further details.

The good news is that it certainly seems to be!  We received a 10% response rate to the survey, with just over half of respondents coming from High Education libraries (52%).  17% worked for publishers, 10% for vendors or intermediaries and 4% worked in a corporate library or information management department.  16% were “other”  - including NHS, Government, Museums, Research Councils, Consultancy Charities and NGOs.   26% of respondents were based outside of the UK.

  “Often I see a problem or its resolution on the list before we've discovered it ourselves. Announcements from publishers are also helpful.” - Independent special research library from United States of America 

On the whole, 96% of respondents felt that the discussion list supported their ability to do their job all or some of the time.  As would be expected the largest % of satisfied customers were high education librarians, but 94% of publishers and 100% of vendors/intermediaries who responded also felt positive about the usefulness of the list.  More work is needed in making the list useful for Corporate librarians with 14% not finding it useful at all.  

Some action points for further discussion at the UKSG include: 

• the list is intended to be useful for discussing e-resources issues more generally, not just journals. We need to find ways of making this clear without diluting the useful discussions already under way
• our readers outside the UK often felt that the discussions were very UK-centric, which was curious to us as the issues raised are more likely global.  We would welcome more interaction from our non-UK readers.
• we need to draft guidelines for our publisher/vendor readers and posters as to what should be posted to lis-e-journals and what should go to Serials E-News which publishes press releases 
• no question is a dumb question, and lurkers who are feeling timid should be encouraged to post their thoughts and questions
• widening the scope to include more on licensing, eBooks, Cataloguing policies, use of aggregator services, “Best practice” guidelines, readers’ perspectives on industry issues and publishing industry news
• More comment – perhaps a weekly digest of blog postings or other discussions relevant to the list
• Possibly a change of name for the discussion list to better reflect a wider scope

Your feedback is welcome - please post it to the list at lis-e-journals@jiscmail.ac.uk or to marketing@uksg.org