STIC Faculty and Student Title Survey

In its October 1996 report, the Executive Working Group for the University of California Digital Library (CDL) recommended the Science, Technology, and Industry Collection (STIC) as CDL's first collection. In the Fall of 1997, the STIC Task Force developed a collection strategy to provide access to a wide range of materials. The initial focus has been on the most heavily used published journal literature from commercial and society-based publishers in a broad range of disciplines from the Life, Health, and Physical Sciences and from Engineering. Members of the Task Force are Alison Bunting (UCLA), Katie Frohmberg (UCB), Susan Starr (UCSD/UCOP), and Beverlee French (CDL). Stella Bentley (UCSB) and Locke Morrisey (UCI) were earlier members of the Task Force. 

In early 1998, librarians across the campuses invited members of the UC faculty to help identify the most heavily used published journal literature. 

The STIC title list contains faculty recommendations from eight of the University of California campuses (Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz). STIC Task Force members collectively developed PowerPoint presentations and held workshops in both Northern and Southern California to elicit the participation of UC faculty members in defining and planning the CDL's collections. 

Across the campuses, nearly one thousand faculty members attended 64 presentations on the LPAI planning effort and the development of the CDL and the Science, Technology, and Industry Collection. Faculty members were asked to name the top five titles they would like to see at their desktops and the top five that should be available for their students.  Many others participated in the survey by electronic mail and the Web. 

Over two thousand faculty members responded to the survey, recommending a total of nearly 8,000 titles. Approximately half of the faculty responded by electronic mail. Five campuses used the Web as one method of contact to elicit nearly 200 responses.  The rest of the responses were submitted on paper at the presentations. 

Mary Engle (CDL) oversaw the reduction data and prepared the summary information. The merged lists of faculty titles and those recommended for students are available via a Web browser or FTP client as Excel files at: 

ftp://ftp.dla.ucop.edu/pub/shared_collections/STIC_data/Titlelist.xls       and ftp://ftp.dla.ucop.edu/pub/shared_collections/STIC_data/Student_titles.xls

The first 1,000 titles are noted and sorted in descending order by number of votes, then alpha by title. They also include the number of recommending campuses. Other files at this site include the list of campus departments that recommended the titles (VotesbyDept.xls) and a more detailed summary on campus participation (STIC_summary.doc). 

For more information, see:	ftp://ftp.dla.ucop.edu/pub/shared_collections/STIC_data

Some titles did not merge due to the usual variations in cataloging, which got the better of Excel.  A simple example came as:

Chemistry & biology 		and	Water environment research
Chemistry and Biology 			Water Environment Federation Research

The data was merged into “views” by the Excel programmer, making it a challenge to manipulate the numbering of the rows (one title per row) in ascending order, starting from 1.  The first ten pages present approximately the top 500 titles of the thousands contained in each list.  The CDL would like to hear about any errors that you observe, particularly the titles that failed to merge.

Please contact Mary Engle if you have corrections or anomalies to report.

Mary Engle
Shared Collections and Services
Voice: (510) 987-0563
Email:  Mary.Engle@ucop.edu