We do this every year for e-journals, and every other year for print-only titles, because they're harder.

We started, however, with an analysis of the "cost per use" of our print book collection because in the end, we really have only one collection budget (even though we, like many other libraries, maintain the fiction for most of the year that books and serials are separate budgets). I can provide more details of our methodology to anyone who is interested, but basically we established a cost-per-use of print books as $8. Thus we use $8 as our benchmark when judging whether a journal should be cancelled or not - over that price, and it's up for serious cancellation consideration; below that, and we judge that we're better off keeping it and removing the equivalent money from the book budget.

The cost per use ratio isn't the only factor, but it is by far the strongest. Others include the absolute volume of uses, making the assumption that ILL would have to shoulder that burden, and we have a very small ILL staff, so $20 per use is ok if it's hundreds of uses per year.

And of course, if the title is specifically looked for by program review/accreditation processes, that is virtually a veto on cancellation.

We just started this year to look at the new COUNTER JR5 data particularly for journals where we have free online access but with a substantial embargo. There isn't much of it yet, although a few major publishers did go back and provide 2013 JR5 data. We've been surprised to find so far that some titles in the biomed/sciences that we expected were critical to have current are seeing their heaviest uses in the pre-embargo years.

I'm fascinated that another library uses ILL requests from other libraries as part of the equation. In times when we're considering cancelling important journals, I'm afraid that's not even on our radar.

For print titles, we don't have reliable in-house-use stats, so we use a combination of abstracts viewed in EBSCOhost (almost all of our important databases are on that platform), plus searches in the logfiles for our A-to-Z list and OpenURL system, to gauge interest/use. And then to that we add the anecdotal experience of the people who physically reshelve them - we're small enough (fewer than 200 print titles left) that that's actually reasonably useful data. This is obviously a LOT more work per title to compile, hence only doing it every other year.

And we have had to do the multiple-scenario-cut analysis, so we do a spreadsheet with "tier" 1, 2, and 3 cuts, where tier 1 is an obvious waste of money that we should cancel even if there's no budget pressure to do so, and 2 and 3 are progressively more painful for hitting larger cut savings targets.

We also do a similar analysis for entire journal packages, including the Big Deals, but so far they're all so much better per use than almost all of the individual journals (and far more cost efficient than the books) that we haven't seriously considered cutting any of them yet.

Melissa Belvadi

User Experience & Collections Librarian

University of Prince Edward Island

mbelvadi@upei.ca 902-566-0581

On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 10:53 AM, Joelle Hannert <jhannert@nmc.edu> wrote:

Hi Caroline,

We did a review last Spring of our subscriptions with a goal of cancelling about $5,000 worth of subscriptions. We primarily looked at cost per use data. I created a spreadsheet with the cost of a year's subscription and divided that by the number of uses for each title in that year. We looked at the past two years (partly because our title-level statistics only went back that far).

Hope that helps!

--
Joelle Hannert
Technical Services Coordinator
Osterlin Library
Northwestern Michigan College
1701 E. Front Street
Traverse City, MI 49686
(231) 995-1684

On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 8:40 AM, Caroline Dean <caroline.dean@uct.ac.za> wrote:

***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

UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN

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