S. Narayan Bodapati wrote:
>
> How long after canceling a subscription to a loose leaf service does your
> organization keep the volumes on the shelf? How long before you withdraw and
> discard the title if the time frames differ? TIA.
>
> Please send your reply to bnarayan@worldnet.att.net or rabtech@swbell.net .
>
> From: Ruth Bodapati, Technical Services
> For: Law Library Association of St. Louis
> Civil Courts Building
> St. Louis, Missouri 63101
At the San Diego County Public Law Library, we make a decision for each
such set at the time we decide to discontinue it or are notified that it
is no longer being printed. The decisions vary from title to title, but
basically follow this kind of thinking: If the set would be quickly
outdated or harmful, then the time is short. Titles in the area of tax
law, for instance, might be left for just a year. Titles in other
areas, e.g., sample forms of leases, could be left out longer, e.g., two
or three years. All such volumes are labelled, so that the user knows
when the subscription was stopped.
One point: We recognize that some titles still carry good information
for quite a while, and that certain looseleafs, such as compression
bound ones supplemented only once or twice a year, are never completely
up-to-date because of publication lag time. Nevertheless, some of our
users seem to be of the opinion that a non-updated looseleaf set is
completely worthless, which suggests that they place too much emphasis
on the supplementation as if it provides them with current law. We have
received a lot of criticism for not updating these sets. At times, I
wonder if the public relations issues from that are so bad that I should
consider simply removing the sets immediately or leaving the labels
off. In a library as membership-oriented as yours, I would think that
this would be a bigger problem.
I would like to hear what others say about this.
Charles Dyer
San Diego County Public Law Library
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Nov 14 2007 - 20:50:00 PST