The University Library’s allocation for the purchase of journals,
books, and databases has remained unchanged for the past several years.
Meanwhile, the cost of these materials increases from 8 - 10% each year.
Just to keep pace with inflation, the Library must cancel about $150,000
worth of journals and other standing order commitments each year.
In 2004, the University Library made a firm commitment to maintaining
journal subscriptions in just one format, preferably electronic. To that
end, we cancelled several hundred print subscriptions to journals available
to us in online collections such as:
- ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Digital Archive
- BioOne
- Criminology: SAGE Full-Text Collection
- Project Muse
- PsycARTICLES
A Journal Usage Database was created to facilitate the process of evaluating
our journal collections. In this database, each title was listed with
cost, department affiliations, usage statistics, departmental comments,
and eligibility for cancellation. (Some titles cannot be individually
cancelled because they belong to a package.)
Throughout the spring and summer of 2005, we worked with department
heads and liaison faculty to evaluate low usage journals that could be
cancelled with the least harm to our collection. Following several rounds
of communication and discussion, final input from the departments has
been obtained, just in time to meet the deadline required by the Library’s
subscription vendor for cancellations effective January 2006. This is
a long process with wide dissemination of relevant information such as
price and usage statistics, notes of core curriculum requirements and
close cooperation between librarians and teaching faculty. Lessons learned
from the 2005 process will be applied in future years as the Library
continues to manage its limited resources carefully.
|
