As I prepare my budget for 2012, I can’t help but reflect about the current cost and renewal increases for electronic content and wonder about how we should proceed to negotiate with some of our information providers.  The majority of the Library’s budget is allocated for electronic content (ejournals, ebooks, databases) and we have done our job to ensure that our collection focuses on content that has an excellent return on investment and supports the medical and research activities of our constituents.  This year, we no longer have low-use journal titles to cut to make room for high-use ones; instead, our focus might have to be on canceling heavily used titles, even titles that our user community defines as essential and high value subscriptions. 

 I am impressed and grateful to those vendors and publishers who are willing to work with us so that we can continue to deliver content that best supports our users’ needs. I am also delighted to see changes in the distribution infrastructure and the investment made by our information providers to furnish content to the “small screen” and help us deliver information at the user’s point of need.  In addition, embedding social networking features can allow for additional sharing of content with like-minded colleagues.

Unfortunately, this willingness to work with Librarians does not exist across the board as there are a few vendors and publishers that only see their bottom line. They have outlined renewal increases that surpass what many of us can actually sustain. In addition, pricing models that are based on the institution’s full-time employee population instead of on those who would actually use the resource is not reasonable. Other ways to increase revenue streams include charging for additional access points or charging for bundled content when you truly only want one or two titles. 

So what is the future of electronic content? What are our best practices for handling renewals and increases? This will largely depend on how our vendors and publishers wish to pursue their business.  From my perspective, it would be a welcomed change if the business relationship could transform to a business partnership and our mutual goal would be to deliver access to quality and relevant information, based on realistic increases driven by the current economy.  This year our renewals will be difficult and it is clear that one of our options will be to walk away from the resource rather than try to absorb an unrealistic increase. With the support of our Library user community, I know we will be able to make the right decisions.  Now more than ever, it is important for our users to voice their opinion regarding the content they access!

 Donna Gibson, Director of Library Services