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Library Acquisitions: Practice & Theory, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 327-331, 1994 Copyright 0 1994 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in the USA. All rights reserved

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1993 CHARLESTON CONFERENCE ISSUES IN BOOK AND SERIAL ACQUISITIONS

PRECONFERENCE ON SERIALS CANCELLATIONS

ADRIAN W. ALEXANDER

Regional Sales Manager

The Faxon Company

Westwood, MA 02090

The preconference on serials cancellations was attended by about 40 conference-goers and was moderated by Bernard (Buzzy) Basch, of Basch Associates. Basch noted in his introduc- tory remarks that serials cancellations of recent years have meant change for librarians, vendors, and publishers alike. Cancellation projects have made better managers of librarians, as they have begun to apply “sound business principles” to their decision-making processes. He also observed that subscription agents have taken the brunt of the declining market, to the point that some are being forced to look at raising service charges in order to remain profit- able. Publishers, meanwhile, have raised prices in some cases and have increased their market- ing efforts in areas outside the United States. Some have also begun offering early-payment discounts to libraries, while a number have reduced the number of extra copies that they print.

The first speaker of the afternoon was Susan Zappen, Acquisitions and Serials Librarian at Renesselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Her paper was titled “Are the Methods Working? Where Do We Go From Here?” Zappen noted that subscription costs have been a continu- ing problem at RPI at least since 1988. Her library has lost 25% of its active serials collec- tion in that time, including 849 titles since 1990. She condensed what she has learned about the serials crisis during that time into “Ten Commandments for Serials Cancellations.”

1. Thou Shalt Not Steal Book Money-In 1988, RPI froze its book budget to cover a $60,000 serials deficit, and their monograph collection has never recovered from the loss. RPI now has a cap on its materials budget of 75%-80% for serials in order to ensure that some- thing is always available for books.

2. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy University’s Money-Zappen believes that money is not the solution to the problem, but she came by this knowledge the hard way. RPI libraries initiated a serials cancellation project in 1988-1989 to cover a budget deficit. Just before the cancel- lations were finalized, the university administration came up with the money to pay for them. This remedy was short-lived, however, as even a generous budget in 1990-1991 was unable

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to keep pace with big price increases for STM titles that year. Zappen’s conclusions from this experience are that “no one library can keep up with both the rising costs of subscriptions and the proliferation of new serial titles,” and that no library can afford “just-in-case acquisitions.”

3. Thou Shalt Educate Faculty - Zappen noted that most of RPI’s faculty were unaware of subscription costs and “other information-cost issues,” including differential pricing and copyright. More important, perhaps, they have failed to comprehend the link between the promotion and tenure system, which rewards proliferation of scholarly literature, and those information costs. Librarians at RPI have responded to this information gap by making faculty aware of the global nature of the serials problem. The director, for example, distrib- uted to the faculty the University of Minnesota’s Senate Library Committee agenda for action. This document encourages faculty to consolidate research findings into one article rather than several, to become aware of cost issues, to reconsider relinquishing copyright to commercial publishers, to encourage reevaluation of relationships between scholarly societies and commer- cial publishers, and to promote discussion of the scholarly communication crisis at profes- sional meetings.

4. Thou Shaft Involve Faculty-Zappen believes that this practice helps combat the “them vs. us attitude” sometimes found in library/faculty relations and replaces it with a more coop- erative atmosphere. Each of RPI’s serials cancellation projects has involved faculty input.

5. Thou Shalt Not Kill the Innocent Titles-Zappen believes that the focus of cancellation projects should be on the expensive titles that dramatically drive prices up and exacerbate budget problems. This is an approach, she says, that “university administrators can accept and appreciate.” Zappen claims that her library “would probably have 400-500 more serial titles on the shelf today if we had obeyed this commandment.”

6. Honor Thy Journal Use Studies-Faculty will accept the results of journal use studies, regardless of their imperfections, because they can see the logic in cancelling titles with little use and high costs. RPI’s most recent use study identified 46 little-used, high-priced titles that are candidates for cancellation in FY93-94, if necessary. Also, ILL requests are averaging less than one per cancelled title.

7. Remember to Use Small, Focused Lists - RPI’s cancellation projects have been evolu- tionary and incremental, improving each year on what was done the year before. Zappen noted that early journal lists were too long, prompting most faculty simply to vote for keep- ing everything. Small, more focused (on cost and use) core lists help faculty become better participants in the process. In fact, RPI used faculty to create the core lists by asking them to identify the journals most important to them for individual research, their general disci- pline, and for their courses.

8. Thou Shalt Reward Effort and Cooperation -Two schools at RPI, Management and Architecture, took the core list approach very seriously and cancelled more titles than required so that they could order new titles. Zappen regards this as a “win-win situation” that “revi- talized” the journal collections in these disciplines. As a result, the library continues to “reward” faculty by permitting the addition of a title when a title of equal cost is cancelled.

9. Thou Shalt Promote Resource Sharing-As RPI has cancelled print serial titles, so have they also increased access, adding electronic versions of several indexing and abstracting services to their OPAC and linking their holdings to citations in those databases. Electronic ILL ordering among RPI, SUNY-Albany, and the New York State Library is now possible, and a supporting union list of serials is being developed. Users can also gain access via the OPAC and the Internet to the library holdings of 17 other universities as well as the CARL Uncover database.

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10. Thou Shalt Foster Communication -Zappen encouraged her audience to “use every means available to communicate with the faculty,” including the campus newspaper, the library newsletter, direct mailing to all faculty (not just deans and administrators), and close cooperation with library friends groups and the faculty library committee. Most important, noted Zappen, librarians should not be faceless. Getting personally acquainted with faculty and administrators is the best way to earn respect and credibility.

American librarians are well acquainted by now with the impact on their serials costs of fluctuating currency exchange rates. Rolf Hasslow of the Chalmers University of Technology in Goterborg, Sweden provided a view of the other side of this dilemma. In 1992, a year in which the dollar was relatively strong against major European publishing currencies, Sweden allowed its kroner to float on the world currency market. This event, noted Hasslow, had an immediate and serious impact on his library (with a serials budget of $900,000 US), as it

decreased his purchasing power for non-Swedish serial titles by almost 30% overall. U.S. titles

increased in cost by almost 55%. The library immediately embarked on a serials cancellation project that employed a math-

ematical formula designed to calculate a cost-effectiveness factor that was based on the follow- ing factors: annual usage, subscription cost, measured size of the bound collection, cost of an ILL request, cost of maintaining a subscription, and shelving and storage costs. Under this methodology, a cost-effectiveness factor or institutional cost ratio (ICR), was identified for each title. An ICR of more than 1 .O was considered a positive indicator of cost-effectiveness. However, when this methodology was applied against Chalmers’ serials collection, almost 75% of the titles were found to have ICRs of less than 1.0. Furthermore, those titles found to be “negatively” cost-effective accounted for 43% of total use.

The library then employed a second methodology to further identify candidates for cancel- lation, using a formula borrowed from the Queen Elizabeth II Library at the University of Newfoundland and designed to calculate cost per use (CPU). In conjunction with this formula, the serials list was sorted by LC class and then divided by quartiles, based on use. Emphasis was placed on cutting titles in the lowest quartile of use within each of the nine schools at Chalmers. Using this methodology, 576 titles were identified for cancellation. Each title had a cost per use of $75.00 or more and no more than one “recorded” use in the past year. The recommendation of the library staff to cancel these titles was supported by the faculty gover- nace board, but the university administration came up with additional funds, anyway. As a result, the final cancellation list totalled only about 15% of purchased journals.

Deana Astle of Clemson University explored the question of whether access or ownership is more cost-effective. Noting that the “fat” in library materials budgets is gone and “meat and muscle” are now being sacrificed in order to keep budgets in line, Astle pointed out that “an increasingly sophisticated and demanding clientele” are forcing library managers to develop models for determining “what is the most cost-effective way to provide people with the infor- mation they need and ways to identify what is available-e.g., access tools.” Little research has been done, she adds, in the area of comparative cost/benefit analysis of the access and ownership paradigms. Models are needed that are based on facts, rather than impressions, and that would include analysis of subscription cost, access costs of commercial document deliv- ery as well as ILL, the relative importance of timeliness, and usage level.

Astle then discussed two studies that had been conducted in this area. The first was the study that involved the cost-per-use methodology from Newfoundland that Hasslow used. This study compared overall costs of a journal subscription versus actual use to those of article access via ILL (not commercial document delivery). In 1989, the University of Newfoundland

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cancelled $291,000 worth of titles from a $1.1 million budget by identifying non-cost-effective titles (15% of 5,800 titles) with this methodology.

Columbia University compared access and ownership cost-effectiveness by collecting data on books and serials not owned by Columbia but requested by their users. The study compared “fully-loaded” costs of ownership with those of access via ILL or through a docu- ment delivery service for materials in biology, physics, and electrical engineering. Their conclu- sion was that access was more cost-effective than ownership, but Astle felt that it was important to note that the researchers also warned that “while it may be cheaper to buy only what researchers identify as needed from footnotes or from indexes and abstracting services, total reliance upon this tactic would deprive our users of the opportunity to find information in the way they have found to be most successful: browsing.”

At Clemson, Astle has begun to examine a sample of titles, looking at subscription cost, number of articles used (where the data were available), copyright fees and document deliv- ery fees (based on Uncover’s fee structure), and circulation data for current unbound serials. She focused her attention on all titles in her sample with two or more circulations within one year, using an arbitrary use estimate of two articles per circulation. The same data were then examined using an estimate of three articles per circulation. One aspect of the data that Astle particularly noticed was the wide variety of copyright fees charged by the publishers that were represented in the sample. Her data showed that most publishers were in the $4.00 to $8.00 range and that most publishers were using the same fee for all of their titles, but there were exceptions. The American Association of Immunologists (a nonprofit publisher), for exam- ple, charges $21.50 per article. On this basis, ordering 10 articles via document delivery would equal the cost of a subscription. Copyright fees, noted Astle, should be monitored continu- ously, just as librarians have done with journal prices. Astle’s conclusion was that librarians need more studies and models of these types in order to assess “our progress in terms of expected outcomes, and to see if our venture into the brave new world of the virtual library is giving us what we and our users want.” Library managers must then share that informa-

tion so that “we all do not have to reinvent the wheel.” The next speaker was Tom Michalak, former president of Faxon Research Services, Inc.;

he was a last-minute addition to the program. Michalak’s topic, appropriately, was the recent advent of table of contents/document delivery services, in response to constantly rising seri- als prices and subsequent cancellations of subscriptions. These services, he noted, are essen- tially automating the browsing function that many users employ when searching serial titles.

Consequently, table of contents (TOC) services in general provide better access to article-level serials literature.

Michalak went on to describe table of contents services in generic terms by discussing key characteristics (quick access to new citations, ability to browse by issue, broad coverage, etc.) and methods of delivery (paper, online, CD-ROM, local site license). He also provided some excellent ideas on evaluation for librarians who are trying to choose a table of contents service. Key factors that should be considered included:

l title coverage; l completeness of the TOC record (just main articles vs. all citable references); l accuracy of data (very important in a keyword-indexed database); l timeliness of input; l search interface design; and l availability of a document delivery service linked to the database.

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Michalak believes that TOC services can provide many benefits to libraries, including wider access to journal citations, bringing journal article records to the user’s desktop, the ability to browse articles regardless of whether the library owns the journal, and the ability to down- load and archive current citations easily. As demand for article delivery increases, he added, libraries will be in a position to provide links between TOC records and local holdings, collect better journal usage information, and use availability of a journal through a TOC service to their collection assessment criteria.

The final speaker of the afternoon was Charles Hamaker, Louisiana State University. His presentation described a different approach to serials cancellations in 1993 than had previously been attempted at LSU. This “new” strategy was based, he noted, on the fact that the collec- tion had become “gridlocked” because of faculty resistance to cancellations after several years of lean budgets. The change in approach this past year basically meant no longer asking faculty “What titles can I cancel?” but rather, “What titles do you really need?”

Hamaker began his new approach to identifying titles for cancellation by focusing on the academic department with the highest average cost per title, Chemistry. He asked each member of that faculty to list up to 30 titles needed for his/her work. They were also asked how often the title was used and in what way (basic research, teaching, keeping current in the field, etc.). Each faculty member also was made aware of a table of contents/document deliv- ery service being offered by the library, with 24-hour delivery of articles at no cost to the faculty member. As a result of this process, Hamaker was able to cancel 195 titles from a current list of 453. The cancellation list, which was agreed to by all of the Chemistry faculty, included 50 titles housed in the Chemistry Reading Room that had previously been regarded as “essential” but which appeared on no one’s “keep” list. Furthermore, Hamaker was able to identify only 70 titles that appeared on the “keep” lists of three or more faculty members. Hamaker summarized his findings by saying that the library was finally asking users the right questions about what to keep and what to cancel. He plans to take this approach campuswide soon, starting next with Geography/Anthropology, which have the highest number of subscriptions on campus. With reference to the “ownership/access” question, he noted that if there is a paradigm, it can be characterized by libraries having the ability now to provide more immediate access to information.

This preconference clearly was the highlight of the 1993 Charleston Conference for this reporter. The papers given here indicated two important trends. First, the methodologies employed by librarians in the serials cancellation/retention process are more objective and substantive than ever before. Secondly, access “alternatives” such as TOC services are begin- ning to have an impact on how librarians make serials collection development decisions. The degree of impact remains to be seen, but it is clear that librarians, vendors, and publishers alike must all give them due consideration from now on.