Some may know that EBSCO is now marketing the Christian Periodical Index. I was recently offered an opportunity to try CPI at Boston University. I won’t comment on the quality of the indexing here, but thought it helpful to identify the overlap titles that are indexed in other products we license (ATLA Religion Database, EBSCOhost Religion and Philosophy Collection, and Catholic Periodical and Literature Index.)

I gathered titles and issn from the American Theological Library Association and EBSCO web sites to use for comparison. For consistency, I tried to use figures based on currently indexed titles. Both the ATLA Religion Database and the Catholic Periodical and Literature Index include titles that are not currently indexed. For these purposes, the ATLA Religion Database claims to index 506 titles, Catholic Periodical and Literature Index claims to index 181 titles, and EBSCO includes 308 titles.

CPI indexes 133 titles according to the list published on their web site. Of those titles, 50 (38%) titles are also indexed by one of the three indexes we already license and 83 (62%) titles are unique to Christian Periodical Index.

I was also interested to know how many CPI titles not indexed by the other three indexes are held by either Boston University or one of the other libraries in the Boston Theological Institute. BTI libraries hold 40 (30%) of the 83 titles unique to CPI.

Below is a list of unique Christian Periodical Index titles:

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“Metrics of Success in Theological Libraries” (David Stewart and Pat Graham)

This was (imho) the best session I attended, prompting us to think more specifically about how one would measure the success of a theological library. They promise to post their presentation to a blog they created for the purpose:

http://metricsositl.blogspot.com/

I hope they will be continue the conversation online.

David briefly mentioned that aligning the library with the educational mission of the school also aligns the expected outcomes of the library with the educational measures used by the school. This is a really profound insight. The measures we have traditionally used have very little to do with the educational mission of the school unless, one makes the assumption that a large collection, high gate-count, and high circulation can be used to measure the success of an educational effort. It’s hard to draw a causal relationship.