The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
How does one evaluate the use of periodicals in the library? Because of the lack of circulation data, it's difficult to determine which ones of our periodicals get read often and which ones don't. Is there a way to do that?
Benjamin Girard-Bond
My library allows magazines to be checked out, including the current issue. This allows for some circulation data, though it doesn't account for in-house use. When evaluating our magazine collection for purchasing decisions, we attached a small 'survey' to the cover of each: basically if a patron used it, they were encouraged to make a tic mark or initial it so we could count this use alongside circ stats. This was somewhat labor intensive: making, cutting out & attaching the tally papers as well as collating the data afterwards--but that's a good task for a volunteer or student!
At least one ILS I've worked with do allow for some kind of non-circ tallying system of in-house use so that data will all live in the same place.
A library I once worked for would use the above whenever they found their magazines not shelves--and they encouraged patrons to NOT reshelve items for this reason (that and misshelving!).
I don't know if this helps but wouldn't the more popular material show more physical wear than unused issues? For example we keep People magazine on the shelves but it doesn't circ often. We can see it's popular though because the issues are visibly worn after just a couple weeks. Other magazines like American Philatelist don't show much wear at all but once they're a month old they circ like any other item.
Our LMS has a module that allows us to scan items to indicate use. As virtually no-one returns magazines to the shelf once they have finished reading them in the library, staff first bring them back to the circ desk and scan them, thus recording their in-house use.
Staff/volunteers who re-shelve magazines keep track with a printed checklist/spreadsheet. This data is compiled by the Serials Librarian, and the information is used as a selection tool. It's very useful when patrons ask why a subscription was dropped.