A Simulated Electronic Availability Study of Serial Articles through a University Library Web Page

Availability tests as traditional collection evaluation and library performance measures and their application to electronic resources are explained in this article. A 500-item sample of serial citations was drawn from scholarly journals in 50 disciplines, evenly divided among the sciences, social sciences, humanities, professional fields, and interdisciplinary areas to simulate the needs of Indiana University- Bloomington researchers. It was found that 65.4 percent of the items were electronically available through the library Web page. The electronic availability rate was highest for professional fields, items in the English language, and items published since 2000. The majority of instances of nonavailability occurred because the journal title was not accessible through the Web page.