The Price and Future of Electronic Content

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.  Continue reading