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

[Melissa Belvadi]

I was just at the Charleston Conference where I heard a member of the
audience at one session complain about having to pay for unused titles in a
Big Deal package.
I thought it reflected a lack of understanding of what a Big Deal actually
is.

So I want to emphasize something Karen says here: "when we calculated the
alternative of subscribing to the most used titles, would be more
economical to split up".

Whenever I've done an analysis on our Big Deals that are based on historic
spend, I find that the titles in our "core" (the basis for our price) are
indeed by far the most heavily used. And the smaller price we pay for "'all
of the rest" is still very cost effective to have access to that long tail.
That is, our cost per full text article used in the long tail is still well
within our internal threshold for renewing journals, either in packages or
individually.

The important point here is to actually do that analysis, and don't think
of the titles in the package that you don't use as "wasted money".
You are paying a pittance per "all the rest" journal relative to their
retail cost exactly because your use of them is expected to be very low and
take the form of that "long tail" distribution.

Melissa Belvadi

On Mon, Nov 9, 2015 at 12:24 PM, Harker, Karen <Karen.Harker at unt.edu> wrote:

> 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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>
>


-- 
Melissa Belvadi
Collections Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
mbelvadi at upei.ca 902-566-0581
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