2014 Charleston Library Conference

The countries of South Asia publish a broad range of journals of importance for research in the languages of the region. These are an essential component of interdisciplinary area studies collections at research libraries but are, by definition, low-use "obscure" materials. It makes sense for librarians who select them to broaden these collections, reduce duplication nationally, and enable shared access to them. The challenge is lack of article-level discoverability of these journals: they are print-only, typically not covered in online indexing/abstracting services. If users cannot discover these articles (except via physical browsing), then how can cooperating libraries share them, and distribute responsibility for collecting them, which is essential to coordinated collection development?

The collaborative SALToC project incrementally address this issue by creating simple, centrally-browsable online tables of contents for target journals, through a low-tech, low-cost distributed process that benefits users at all participating libraries. For journals not available online nor included in article databases or print indexes, this kind of discovery facilitates research by finally enabling scholars use previously undiscoverable journal holdings of other libraries: they can now issue interlibrary loan, document delivery, and/or offsite retrieval requests, with full citations for the desired articles. (Many libraries don't lend journals on interlibrary loan, but DO provide article-level document delivery on request, IF the requester has a citation). Coordinated collection development in a given content area (planned reduction of duplication coupled with broader collective coverage) becomes supportable in the research library community only when shared access (and its prerequisite -- discovery) is provided. The South Asian Language Journals Table of Contents (SALToC) project represents a proof-of-concept demonstration of the value of this approach. This paper shows how simple, "grass-roots" distributed efforts can contribute significantly to discoverability of hard to discover resources, thereby making coordinated collection development cost-effective, popular among users, and sustainable.