Comparing medical journal holdings at two university libraries

Abstract

A collection analysis project was undertaken to learn about the medical journal collections at the MIT Libraries and Harvard’s Countway Library of Medicine in order to: – Examine the collection relationships (strengths, weaknesses, overlaps) between the MIT Libraries and Countway Library; – Inform future collections and services decisions at either library. Two factors driving our current interest in this area include: – Requests from faculty members for a list of medical journals available for their use and whether they are at MIT or Countway; – Open comments made by respondents to a recent MIT Libraries User Survey indicating that some of our users are unaware of the MIT Libraries medical journal collection. We compared data extracted from the SFX knowledge bases and Aleph catalogs at MIT and Harvard University. Come hear about our methodology, data limitations we encountered, and ideas for future research and collaboration.