Hi Caroline & the list,

A colleague forwarded your post and it’s prompted me to get around to joining the listserv.

 

I think some work I’ve done here may be of some use.

For our renewals this year, we established a set of criteria and a system for assigning numerical scores to all of our print titles based on those criteria. This helped us to determine whether or not to renew or cancel a given title from our print serials and cut titles with more confidence.

 

We looked at the following criteria:

·         Renewal Price

·         Usage at our library
We have a database that tracks when an issue of a serial is reshelved, so we end up with a number of times we recorded a title’s use, we’d guess this only covers about half or ¼ of actual usage, but 0 recorded uses for an entire year is a strong indicator that a title isn’t seeing much use.

 

·         ILL Usage
How often a title was borrowed by other libraries from our collection.

 

·         Overlap with databases & embargos.
We long ago pruned most of the print titles with non-embargoed print counterparts, but there are some titles with short embargos that are worth evaluating if already held in a database and not part of a core academic program.

 

·         “Academic Value”
This is a fuzzier metric on how well the Ebsco-assigned Classification number (in our case DDC) correlated with our print book collection, assuming that areas we collect heavily in our monograph collection would be areas of academic importance for serials as well.

 

I hope those criteria are helpful to you in making those hard decisions, we had to cut quite a few titles and a few databases this year and these criteria were helpful in determining how to do that in a way that’s much more systematic than scanning the list and asking staff if they’d ever seen anyone use an obscure, expensive title.

 

For a little more detail on the project beyond the criteria we used  and to get into a little about how we looked at and measured those criteria:

The system we developed ended up outputting a score for each of these metrics, I’d assigned a score, usually based on the percentile rank of a title’s value: an expensive title would have a very high percentile rank relative to all the other titles and would have a low “affordability score.” Titles with low relative usage would correspondingly receive a low Usage score, etc. So you end up with a number between 1 and 25 for each title based on the five criteria, with more valuable titles scoring higher. I ended up merging a lot of data sets in Open Refine from a handful of Excel spreadsheets from vendors, statistics and our usage database.

 

To draw up scenarios like you’ve been asked to do, we’d take our final output spreadsheet and determine which titles would have to be cut to add up to 5, 10 and 15% cuts. So you would get all the titles with less than 7 and determine that they have a total renewal price of 5% of your budget for example and then work out what cutting those titles would do to the services, patrons, and staff.

 

I have a proposal in to NASIG 2015 to present this project in greater detail, which I hope will be accepted since we all often face flat or shrinking budgets.

 

Let me know if you have clarification questions or if I can provide more information about our experience.

Best of luck, I hope my input has been helpful.

 

Thank You,

Andrew M. Kelly

Technical Services Librarian

Joan Weill Library

Paul Smith’s College

Paul Smiths, NY 12970 USA

 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Caroline Dean <caroline.dean@uct.ac.za>
Date: Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 8:40 AM
Subject: [SERIALST] subscription review/cancellation exercise - the 3 scenarios
To: SERIALST@listserv.nasig.org

 

***Cross-posted to multiple lists; please excuse duplication.***

 

Dear colleagues

 

The subscriptions (e-journals, p-journals, databases) budget at the University of Cape Town Libraries is facing a budget cut. Our finance department has asked us to draw up scenarios on what the impact to the university will be if the subscriptions budget is cut by 5, 10 and 15%?

 

Have you undertaken such an exercise recently? Or even a straight-forward review/cancellation exercise? What are some of the criteria you used to evaluate titles for retention or cancellation?

 

Thank you

 

Regards

Caroline

 

 

 

Caroline Dean

Acquisitions Manager

University of Cape Town Libraries,

Private Bag X3, Rondebosch, 7701, South Africa.

 

Tel: +27 21 6503701

Fax: +27 21 6502044

Email: caroline.dean@uct.ac.za

 

 

 

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