I forwarded the query about the ECHET96 CD-ROM to our librarian - this is his response. Mary Masson

...

Mary, It nestles in an ***unopened pocket*** on the current periodicals shelves. These items are, of course not borrowable at present. When it becomes borrowable it will be security taped and left in the pocket at the back and eventually bound into the finshed volume.

The real problem is the fact that these "freebies" are not well flagged up on the covers and are therefore vulnerable to theft or damage or, indeed, interpretable as "junk mail". The other problem is that they are proliferating leaving the problem for us and every one of our users: What do we do with, say, 10 CDs that have been loosly associated with one volume of a journal? Make them separately available in a new CD collection? Specially bind them into pockets at the back (thus increasing binding costs and catalogue complications - for you have to record what they contain and that they are in the journal and that means breaking into our fairly uncomplicated "low maintenance" periodical cataloguing methodology)? Or what???

What we tend to do is to put such CDs into pockets at the back of the finally bound volume and pray that they don't walk ***before*** the binding. Floppies are, of course a different problem as they can be wiped by our senistiser/desensitiser machines.

I can understand why publishers want to distribute in this way. But I wish they would: 1) ***clearly*** flag the presence of a disk on the outside front cover. 2) Consider whether such disks are to be given the status of a supplementary series or some other bibliographic identity (there's a clear paper analogue here) or what. The more ambiguity there is about status the more chance that someone will decide that they are "junk mail" and throw them out - and yes this has happened!

By the way, am I being a bit professionally over-sensitive here in finding that I am not too happy about the phrase: " Our librarian for example actually noticed the bulge. . .". ACTUALLY NOTICED!!!!! This might be read as: "the poor ninny hardly notices anything. . ." .

Cheers Allan

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Allan Stewart Principal Information Consultant Directorate of Information Systems & Services Queen Mother Library Meston Walk Aberdeen AB24 3UE

---------------------- Dr Mary Masson Department of Chemistry, University of Aberdeen, Meston Walk, Old Aberdeen AB24 3UE Tel. 01224 272931 m.masson@abdn..ac.uk ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)