Records which met the following criteria were extracted from the partner catalogs for analysis:
- Leader position 07 (bib level) = s (serial)
- Leader position 06 (type of record) = a (language material)
- Not electronic (usually determined by location code)
- Not suppressed
- Numeric 001 (e.g. not ssj###)
These records were filtered by local protected categories (that were developed for print monographs) and also titles stored in special collections. The Collections Development Committee were provided with lists of titles that fall into these categories and agreed which should receive a retention commitment.
The remaining titles were compared by ISSN to title lists from PORTICO, JSTOR, Proquest Periodicals Archive Online, Proquest American Periodicals, Proquest British Periodicals and American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals 1-5 (UMaine). Titles in these repositories have been taken out of consideration for retention. The remaining titles were compared with OCLC WorldCat holdings to pull out for review titles where there are fewer than 50 holding libraries in OCLC WorldCat. The Collections Development Committee were provided with lists of titles that fall into this category and decided which titles should be committed.
N.B. The varying local cataloguing practices of what titles are coded ‘S’ for serial has meant that MSCS are not only analyzing journals and serials, but also monographic series. The Committee agreed that titles that had been excluded from the monograph collection analysis should be included in the journal/serial analysis to ensure they didn’t ‘fall between the cracks’ of what is considered a journal and monograph.