The Chronicle of Higher Education had an article recently the decision at Morris Library and other libraries to drop out of ‘Big Deals.’ David Fowler and Jonathan Nabe gave a conference presentation about the topic, and the article was based largely on that presentation.
Both the Chronicle article and the subsequent comments emphasize the raw dollar cost of the deals and of dropping out of them. Some of the comments note that when they examined their usage statistics, they realized that it would cost more to offer the same level of access to journals in their Big Deal if they dropped out.
When the inflation rate for journals outstrips inflation and the library’s collections budget lags behind inflation, it means the library is going to offer less of something. In the last decade, there were big cuts to the journals outside the Big Deals. It had reached the point that not dropping out of the Big Deal would amount to cancelling subscriptions to important journals from societies and small publishers that weren’t in a position to have a Big Deal.
If you think that the library should have cut something other than journals, please keep in mind that from 2004-2005 to 2008-2009, the serials spending at Morris Library, the Law Library, and the Medical Library in Springfield went from $5.5 million to $6 million. The total (non-capital) library expenditures for that same time went from $14.6 million to $15.2 million. A lot of the cuts already were coming from something other than journal subscriptions. (These numbers come from the ARL Statistics and are not constant dollars. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI calculator, $14.6 million in 2005 is $16 million in 2009 dollars).
We were not looking at how much it would cost to keep the same level of access; it was looking at what loss of access would be the least painful.
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I also have a couple minor quibbles with the article:
• Jonathan is a collection development librarian, not the collection development librarian. Jeanne Cross and Roger Cross are the other two librarians at Morris Library with that title.
• The article includes the statement, “By cutting 230 titles, mostly in science and engineering—the fields with the most expensive journals—the library saved $300,000 a year.” Jeanne, Roger, and Jonathan deal with plenty of jealousy between departments, so I want to make it clear that the dollar savings came mostly from science and engineering, but the cuts to journals were spread across all subject areas. Because science and engineering journals cost so much more than humanities journals, it is common for cutting one science journal to save as much money as cutting ten humanities journals.
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