Our chief goal at the Salmon Library is to provide the best possible set of resources to serve our research and education mission on The University of Alabama in Huntsville campus. To this end, the selection of resources to which we offer access is regularly changing as we make decisions to improve the overall quality of our collection and to respond directly to the needs of the faculty and students on the campus while balancing needs of budget and usefulness. It is easy to brag about the new purchases and the expanded collections. It is not so easy to bring up the collections to which we have to reduce access, especially when the collection in question is a “de facto” collection, such as Wiley.

As of January 1, 2016, we have migrated our Wiley collection from a package deal – with which we got hundreds of journal titles for one lump sum – and over to an à la carte system, where we purchase key and well used journals on a title by title basis. The reasons for this are numerous, but can basically be summarized into these two criteria:

1. The number of uses for the majority of the titles (and we mean the vast majority, over 95%) was very low, ranging from zero to one click all year.
2. There were other key resources that faculty and students requested more often and would be a much greater value to us.

For example, we have recently been able to expand to complete, unlimited access to ASTM Compass. As anyone who has ever needed to use standards in their projects and research knows, timely access to a library of standards can be vital for grant writing and for research proposals.

In the case of Wiley, we are still monitoring patron feedback about titles that were more vital than statistics can necessarily inform. We understand that there are some titles you only use ten times a semester, but those ten times are a bigger deal than average. If you have any title you would like to see returned, please contact our Electronic Resources Librarian, Michael Manasco, at either michael.manasco@uah.edu or by phone at (256)824-6965.

Thank you.