RE: Seven ARL Libraries Face Major Planned or Potential Budget Cuts

["Tobia, Rajia C" <TOBIA@uthscsa.edu>]

I feel I must chime in, too.  In the late 1980s and most of the 
1990s, we also painfully canceled many journal titles due to flat 
budgets, budget cuts, and inflationary increases.  By joining in 
consortial "Big Deals" starting in the late 1990s, we were able 
to offer our faculty and students a richer mix of titles than 
ever before possible.

We did an analysis in 2004 of our Big Deals with Elsevier, Wiley, 
and Blackwell.  We wanted to find out how much it would cost to 
replace shared titles we received because we are part of a 
consortium Big Deal. We wanted to make sure we were getting value 
for our dollars.  We analyzed titles that our library received 
through a consortium Big Deal with those three publishers. The 
titles we reviewed were titles that were not part of our 
historically subscribed titles but shared titles among the 
consortium.  We arbitrarily picked an article download rate of 
100 or more article downloads per title per year as being high 
use.  We then looked at the full subscription costs of these 
titles. It would have cost the library an additional $500,000+ to 
subscribe to these shared consortium titles on our own, an 
additional $500,000 that we just do not have.

Now, I am not a big fan of Big Publishing but on a practical 
level, it would be very difficult for our faculty and researchers 
to lose access to these highly used titles. I think for the small 
to medium sized academic library, Big Deals have not been an 
entirely bad thing, particularly if there are pooled consortium 
subscriptions as the backbone of the deal. The economic times are 
tough and we may have to bow out of some of our Big Deals, but at 
a loss of many titles that are being used on our campus.

Rajia Tobia, A.M.L.S.
Executive Director of Libraries
University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio
Briscoe Library
Mail Code 7940
7703 Floyd Curl Drive
San Antonio, TX 78229--3900
Phone: 210/567-2413
Fax: 210/567-2490
mailto:tobia@uthscsa.edu