2009 Collections Review

Collection budget reduction

The Library spends approximately $3million per year on monographs and $5 million on serials, 90% in US$. There has been significant benefit achieved through consortial negotiation and package purchases over the past ten years. No deficit has been carried forward from 08/09 thanks to university administration support.

The Library is facing a significant collection budget shortfall for 09/10. The reasons for the cut are complex: the decline in Canadian dollar,on average, from 1.05 in 07/08 to 1.16 anticipated in 09/10; an actual cut of $393k; and annual serials increases, usually around 6%, independent of the $$ fluctuation. Thus there is an estimated shortfall of $1.58 million. Furthermore, the Library has multiyear commitments of $1.4 million. We can anticipate further cuts in 2010/11.  2009/10 Budget Overview

The draft collection budget is modeled on a 20/25% reduction on departmental and general lines, based on last year's expenditures but taking into account mitigating circumstances (new programming etc.).  Your liaison librarian and library departmental representative will be reviewing the options with you.

Process

‘Principles’ for the cutback have been reviewed by the Senate Library Committee and an Advisory Committee formed with representatives from each of the faculties as well as undergraduate and graduate students. Data such as cost per use are being gathered; the relative cost of cancelling certain ‘packages’ and buying individual titles and relying on Interlibrary has been calculated; and spending within ‘general’ and discipline specific funds is being reviewed.

If they haven't already done so, your Liaison librarian and Library Departmental Representative will be providing information and discussing specific plans with you in the near future.  Before any final decisions are made, there will be consultation with faculty departmental representatives and individual faculty.

Because of the lead time in journal cancellations, final decisions must be made by the end of July 2009, allowing until September 4 for review by all faculty for possible adjustments.

Journals

While every discipline is different, in many departments the decision will be to preserve journal subscriptions and reduce book expenditures.  With this in mind, the library is examining the cost and usage of journal packages.  These packages have greatly increased access to scholarly journals for SFU researchers, as reflected by article downloads and faculty citations and publications.

Journal packages from specific publishers were originally created by aggregating and reallocating expenditures used to purchase individual titles from that publisher; increases to those expenditures have for the most part been less than might have been expected, through the negotiating power of consortial agreements. The packages represent significant collections in all disciplines and have greatly expanded direct access to resources (as opposed to ILL delivery). 

In 2001 SFU researchers had access to 16,300 journals: 8000 in print or microform and 8300 online, primarily from aggregated full-text databases (2000/01 Annual Report ).  As of 2009 access had increased to 63,500 journals total: 11,500 in journal packages, 2,500 direct subscriptions and 49,500 in aggregated full-text databases (from an analysis of CJDB and catalogue holdings).  This represents a fourfold increase in journal titles. 

SFU faculty and students are downloading articles from online journals in great numbers.   In 2008 downloads fron direct subscriptions numbered 128,900 at an average cost of $2.06 each and downloads from journal packages numbered 1,307,600 at an average cost of $1.90 each.  Statistics on downloads from aggregated full-text databases are not available.

Statistics also show that previously unavailable journals receive significant usage.  In 2008, 49,000 or 35% of the downloads from Blackwell Synergy were from journals SFU did not subscribe to before the package, and from Taylor and Francis Informaworld the numbers were 31,200 downloads or 62%.

Further, an analysis of citation trends indicates that packages have expanded the breadth of journals cited by SFU faculty. To determine if faculty used newly available e-journals in their research, SFU Library analyzed SFU citation data to journals from selected packages for two years prior to signing a major package agreement (1993 and 1998) and for two consecutive years following the agreement (2004 and 2005). Pre packages, the percentage of citations to journals that are part of packages but were previously not subscribed to was an average of 2.6%. Post packages this increased to an average of 6.1%. (http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v08n01/taylor_d01.htm)

Publication trends also reflect the importance of journal packages.  A review of publications in Web of Science by SFU authors between 2004 - 2008 provided a list of 75 journals in which more than one SFU authored article appeared.  Of these 75 journals, 51 are in journal packages, 9 are individual subscriptions, 7 are in aggregated (full-text) databases, 5 are open access and 4 are not subscribed to by SFU.

Detailed analyses of the usage of individual titles and modelling of the cancellation of the journal packages is ongoing, based on the usage of individual journals within packages (1.34 MB file).  As package prices are based on the cost of our print subscriptions prior to the package agreements, cancelling packages and reverting to titles originally held in print form yields no savings and incurs a significant lost of content, as measured either by number of journals or article downloads, for example for Informaworld loss of 87% of titles and 62% of downloads.  Other models are being considered but all would result in few savings and a major loss of access to journals, for example canceling the Blackwell package and resubscribing to all titles with more than 100 downloads would save 11% on costs but lose 28% of article downloads. 

Books

Books are acquired either through approval plans (all titles on a given subject) or by specific title purchases (often in response to faculty requests).  Initial savings of about 10% on the approval book portion of the budgets have been achieved by moving to paperback preferred approval books.  This does not apply to materials purchased as a direct request.  The savings can be used to cover part of the budget reduction or reallocated to other lines within the departmental budget.

General comments

In the broader  picture, we are not alone. Large US University libraries are also hard hit because of the loss in endowment income – a far larger source of their collection  funding than ours. The International Consortium of Library Consortia has issued a call to publishers to recognize the situation and ameliorate price increases (supported by CRKN etc.) Some minor effect has been detected (eg a recent CRKN package reduced from 12/12/12% increase proposed to 3/3/3% after libraries refused agreement and, just recently, announcements by the AMS and OECD that they will hold their prices fixed).

The Library continues to discuss possibilities with the University Administration for ameliorating this situation but everyone is hurting. We are also following up with University Advancement about possible fundraising opportunities. We are making every effort to be as equitable as possible in this difficult circumstance.

Chuck Eckman, University Librarian and Dean of Library Services
email: ceckman@sfu.ca phone 778.782.3265