ROBERT SWISHER AND PEGGY C. SMITH Journals Read by ACRL Academic Librarians,

A study was undertaken to identify the amount and kinds of professional journal reading being done by ACRL academic librarians, with data drawn from two separate surveys made over a jive-year period of time. Question-naires were sent to a sample of ACRL members in 1973 and again in 1978, which ascertained how many journals they were reading regularly and what the titles of those journals were. Illustrations provide a comparison of most frequently read titles for 1973 to 1978, with the percentage of reader response for each title. For both years surveyed, ACRL academic librarians averaged approximately seven journals read on a regular basis. A separate analysis of the 1978 data indicated that 7 percent of the titles cited as being read accounted for 80 percent of the journal reading. As had been the case in 1973, more than nine in ten of these academic librarians were regular readers of College & Research Libraries (C&RL). However, several other titles heavily cited in 1973lost readership among ACRL members due to the dramatic appearance of the Journal of Academic Librarianship. THE soLIDIFIED INTEREST in the use of infor-mation and in the audiences of information systems, is a fundamental development of the last two decades. With a combination of ec-lectic techniques and methods ranging from citation analysis and other bibliometric tech-niques, to the investigation of the actual information-seeking behavior of users, we have begun the arduous yet important task of describing and generalizing the information-seeking behavior of our audiences. Curiously, there remains at least one audi-ence that lags far behind as a focus of such attention and subsequent analysis. While our research has something to say about the sci-entist and the engineer, the student and the researcher, the physician, the disciplinarian, it has very little to say about the information-seeking behavior of a profession whose very reason for existence is facilitating the flow of information: academic librarians