What prompted the decision to change to counting serial unique titles?
Unlike previous years, serial titles are deduplicated. The former instructions for reporting serials were that libraries report the “total number of subscriptions…” Serials counting was problematic since many libraries engage in multiple consortia arrangements and the serials count was inflated by duplicated titles held in multiple packages. Deduplication provided a new way of counting serials focusing on titles to reflect the true scope of the content provided by research libraries. Furthermore, in the electronic environment, once you own or lease a title, it is often accessible by all users at the same time. So a more authentic descriptive statistic for the scope of the content is titles rather than subscriptions.
