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 [log in to unmask]