Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

How To Cut A Third Of Your Journal Subscriptions (And Keep Faculty Happy), Janelle L. Wertzberger, Kathleen D'Angelo

Janelle Wertzberger

When faced with a 0% budget increase for fiscal year 2010, librarians at Gettysburg College designed a comprehensive review of journal subscriptions. Library staff began by gathering data about format(s), price, publisher, and more. Then subject librarians consulted with academic departments and asked faculty to review titles for relevance to current research and curriculum. 100% of departments cooperated with the review with a mixture of enthusiasm and concern; in the end, most offered to cancel about a third of their journal titles. By trimming multiple format subscriptions, relying on aggregator databases for full text content, cancelling titles that no longer …