Serial Use by Social Science Faculty: A Survey

The 226 faculty members in the social sciences at the University of Illinois who responded to a survey of their use of serials provided information re-garding their serial needs and patterns. of use, as well as the usefulness of specified services. Implications of the findings for improving library service in spite of budgetary constraints are discussed. One finding indicates that faculty use the library's serial collection as a supplemental rather than pri-mary source, and this may invalidate the "core collection " theory. sERVICE TO THE FACULTY, undeniably a high priority of the academic research li-brary, has traditionally been seen as closely related to the size of the collection. The as-sumption has been that faculty needs are satisfied by a large collection, by special borrowing privileges, and by the provision of carrels or studies in the library. Histori-cally, academic librarians have believed that faculty members were expert bibliographers who knew how to use. the card catalog and were at home in the book stacks. 1 Refer-ence services, when given, have often been designed to help the faculty members find material for themselves. Although through the years authors like Rothstein have argued for the provision of actual information to the scholarly commu-nity, 2 academic librarians have continued to believe that such service is neither needed nor desired. To the extent that the humanist scholar is seen as the prototype faculty member, the librarians ' view of the faculty's need for service is correct. 3 The evidence suggests that the typical social sci-ence faculty member is different from this prototype. Nelson's survey revealed that social scien-tists were less aware of library services and more critical of librarians ' performance than