Math Journal Weeding Reversed
at University of New Mexico
Library officials at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque are attempting to retrieve about 500 bound volumes of mathematics journals that were deaccessioned in June 2000. After discovering that the journals were gone, 30 faculty members in the mathematics and statistics department wrote a letter to the administration criticizing the decision, stating that the titles—among them complete sets of the American Journal of Mathematics and the Annals of Mathematics— “contain some of the most significant developments in the mathematics of the last century.”
Most of the journals had been sent to a math professor at Cornell University who tries to salvage unwanted periodicals, but others went to the University of Louisville and the United States Book Exchange, a nonprofit organization that supplies back issues of scholarly journals to libraries worldwide.
Dean of Library Services Bob Migneault said in the May 7 Albuquerque Tribune that declining storage space was the reason for weeding the titles, which are all accessible through JSTOR, a Web-based scholarly journal archive available at UNM.
The library has made arrangements to replace some of the journals with collections owned by the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Posted May 14, 2001.
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