[Eril-l] Is Breaking Up THAT Hard to Do?

[Harker, Karen]

We’ve been going through this process for the last several years.  We evaluated every journal package in terms of overall use, overall cost-per-use, cost per title, CPU for each title, distribution of use across titles (as in 80% of uses were for what % of titles), and the list-price CPU.

There were some packages which were clearly not good deals.  These were packages where the distribution of usage across titles was very limited (80% of uses were from < 15% of titles), and which, when we calculated the alternative of subscribing to the most used titles, would be more economical to split up.

There were other packages which clearly were a good deal – low overall CPU, high distribution of usage across titles, and, most importantly, they were affordable.  These we continued.

Then there are those packages which were a good deal, but were unaffordable to continue.  These were the biggest of the big deals.  These were the hardest to cut.  By any measure, attempting to subscribe to the better-performing titles individually would have exceeded the cost of the package.  But, taken as a single source of expenditures, they were unsustainable.  It was only after making these cuts (and explaining our intention to have to cut the biggest of the big deals) that the library was appropriated more funds.  But this is only temporary…no more than 3 years.  This decision will have to be revisited.

The point it, breaking up a well-performing package is very, very hard to do.  At some point, you have to cut titles that have very low CPU’s or otherwise are a good value.  It’s like getting very heavy mortgage at a very low rate.  Yes, it’s a good deal, but if you don’t have the money in the budget, you have to pass on it.

Karen Harker
Collection Assessment Librarian
940-565-2688
Libraries are for Use<http://librariesareforuse.wordpress.com/>

From: Eril-l [mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org] On Behalf Of Colleen A McGhee-French
Sent: Monday, November 09, 2015 10:05 AM
To: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org
Subject: [Eril-l] Is Breaking Up THAT Hard to Do?

Hi all,

I tried searching the archives of this list, but perhaps I am not doing it correctly. I couldn't find any discussion of the idea of/implementation of/success with breaking up journal packages.

Yet I would think we all have them - huge, huge journal packages, each containing more than 1200 or so journals, only a fraction of which are important/used - sometimes very important/highly used, each also containing hundreds of journals that we're paying for that have not been used in the last several years, at least to our knowledge.

Has your institution thought about this? Tried it? Succeeded/failed at it, and why? What were the largest obstacles to success?

Or has your institution thought about it and figured, Hey - the very important journals are used SO MUCH that the package overall is actually fairly economical and that those are the journals to concentrate on (rather than the huge number of unused journals)?

Thoughts?

Colleen
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