Horn Library Content Strategy

Periodicals Strategy

The strategic focus of our collection is entrepreneurship (practical and theoretical), the business creation process, small business, social & non-profit business, family business, business plans, entrepreneurship education, women and business, industry content, company histories, including historical case studies, and global studies. This emphasis on entrepreneurship is complemented by content in support of the liberal arts that are part of Babson's integrated curriculum, with representative content in the arts, cultural topics, history, humanities, language studies, literature, math, and the sciences.

Periodical/article databases include scholarly journals, popular and general publications, and news publications, generally held for the current three years. Many key journals or those that are unavailable electronically have archives back many more years. For some key publications like The New York Times, we subscribe to the complete digital archive.  

Print

Since serials represent a significant and continuing expense, requests from faculty or students for new titles are reviewed carefully.   Besides general collection development criteria, periodicals are selected and retained according to the following criteria:  

  • accessibility through indexing and abstracting,
  • availability through online services in text, image or text plus graphics formats,
  • availability in other local libraries,
  • usage or demand as measured by interlibrary loan and other requests,
  • duplication of content in other received sources and cost
     

 Select national and international newspapers are acquired and retained according to periodicals collection development guidelines.  Boston area and international newspapers are acquired to provide news of local events. Most are retained no longer than 2 months plus current month.  If needed for a semester, issues will be retained for 4 months.  International newspapers and magazines are selected according to country representation among the student body, alumni, international internship programs, and curriculum needs.  English-language is preferred, however at least one foreign language periodical is purchased for each language taught at Babson.

Horn Library's core periodicals are those that are the "must-have" journals for teaching, research, accreditation, and idea generation.  Our policy is to subscribe to these in print as well as making sure they are accessible online with full archive. 

Periodicals available electronically are duplicated in paper if graphics are critical and online images are not adequate or online versions are not as complete or current as needed.

The current periodicals collection will include in paper format core browsing titles for the top three research and practitioner journals in each major discipline at Babson. These titles are determined by journal rankings and in consultation with the respective academic division's liaison librarian who solicits input from the division's faculty.

The Browsing Collection is a current collection of popular magazines and journals, including many of the trade journals to which we subscribe.  The collection’s primary intent is for pleasure reading versus scholarly work.  The titles in the collection are selected by librarians with vital input from students.  Student recommendations are welcome anytime.  The collection includes more than 100 titles which may vary depending on current space constraints.  Some examples of titles included in the collection are: Time, Money, Harvard Business Review, Billboard, and National Geographic.

Online

For publications that are not available through third-party databases, we subscribe directly.  We also subscribe directly to some publications if the database version does not include graphical content.  Some of these key publications are:

  • Boston Business Journal
  • Chronicle of Higher Education
  • Chronicle of Philanthropy
  • Economist
  • Financial Times
  • New York Times
  • Science
  • Wall Street Journal
  • Washington Post
  • EBSCOhost: Includes key databases such as Academic Search Premier, Business Source Complete, EconLit, PsycInfo, Communications & Mass Media Complete, Medline, Regional Business News, and others.
  • Gale: Access to Academic OneFile, General Business File, and several themed databases such as Global Issues in Context.
  • JSTOR: An online archival collection of over 500 major academic research journals covering topics in the arts, humanities, business, and sciences.
  • Nexis Uni: Covers major U.S. and world publications, news wires, TV-radio-broadcast transcripts, blogs, web publications, SEC filings, legal materials, law reviews, state/federal cases & codes, tax law, patents, company information, and more.
  • ProQuest: Includes ABI/Iinform, Accounting & Tax, Entrepreneurship, Historical Newspapers, and more.
  • ScienceDirect: Contains over 25% of the world's science, technology, and medical full text articles and bibliographic information from over 2500 journals, plus eBooks, reference works, handbooks, and book series.

To supplement these large publication aggregator services, we also subscribe to smaller periodical collections such as Emerald Management, Blackwell/Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and others.