From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2015 00:09:17 +0000

>As an aside, the question of usage - in the sense Rick used it - in a
>big deal environment is an interesting one.  Many institutions are
>purchasing - through big deals - access to journals that are never or
>rarely used at their institution.  The nature of the current market
>means that purchasing decisions and usage information about individual
>journals have become only loosely coupled.

This is true when it comes to big deal packages, at least at the level of
the individual journal title: we don¹t generally renew or cancel big deals
based on how much any particular title is used, but rather on what the
cost per use looks like for the package as a whole. (Whether this is a
good thing or a bad thing on balance is, itself, an interesting question.)

But when it comes to individual journal subscriptions, I think I can
safely say that usage remains very tightly coupled to renewal decisions ‹
and while research libraries do very often have several big deal packages
that take lots of individual journals off the table at
renewal/cancellation time, it¹s also true that most research libraries
still maintain hundreds if not thousands of individual journal
subscriptions and have to make renewal/cancellation decisions about them
individually. When we have to make a cut, the first thing we ask is
³What¹s the cost per download, and how does it compare to the cost of ILL
or document delivery?²

---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections
Marriott Library, University of Utah
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