Journal arrangement in the Kline Science Library

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Where materials are housed

New journal issues are placed in the This Week's Journals display area, the wooden shelves on your right as you enter the main room.

At that time, a colored label is placed on the title shelf in the alphabetically arranged Unbound Journal Display Area for each new journal issue. This allows users to both find the unbound issues by title and to locate and browse the most recent receipts.

After one week the new journal issues are moved onto the slanted shelves in the Unbound Journal Display Area, and remain there (check behind the slanted shelves for older issues) until they are bound and placed in the regular collection ... where they are interfiled with book materials and arranged by LC (Library of Congress) call numbers.

Why not alphabetical by title for bound journals

Call numbers arrange material by subject, making it easier to collocate related materials. An alphabetical arrangement of journal titles has been considered, and will be reconsidered in the future when we no longer receive as many paper materials. (At that time we will have also reduced the number of paper titles by shifting paper duplicates of online equivalents to the off-site Library Shelving Facility). For now, there are a number of reasons why it is not feasible to shelve journals alphabetically in a collection the size of the Kline Science Library.

The primary reasons are:

many journal titles change each year, and maintaining an alphabetical arrangement would require significant continual disruptive and expensive shifts of the entire collection;
in many cases users would then need to walk across the entire library for previously titled materials (e.g. Zietscrift fur Physik became European Journal of Physics);
official titles are often not what users expect (e.g. Cell Biology is really Journal of Cell Biology); and
because similar subject materials would be located all over the library (e.g. Applied Physics and Solid State Communications) it would require far greater walking in order to use related materials. Almost all large libraries now use the LC arrangement of bound journal materials.

Online journals will allow us to reeevaluate this process in a few years, and we continuously review this decision.

How can this situation be made easier for known item retrieval

The library understands that using a computer to access known journals is difficult and ineficient, and we have created a number of ways to make the identification of appropriate call numbers easier to find.

The easiest tool is the online Journal Abbreviation and Title Search site, which is located on the first page of all science library sites. This tool allows users to enter abbreviations, partial titles, or complete strings and determine local holdings and call numbers.

In addition, the Kline Science Library has created "most frequently used journal lists" for the following areas: Interdisciplinary sciences, biology, chemistry, and physics. These paper lists provide the call numbers for the top 50-80 titles in each area, and also show if electronic equivalents are available.

REMEMBER: Only Orbis provides complete holdings, locations, and bindery information for our currently received journal collection. For absolutely comprehensive searching of KSL journal titles you will also need to search the roll-o-dex list of journal titles for earlier materials that are not yet on the Orbis computer (the retrospective conversion is nearing completion.)

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