Abstract
After a decade of declining funds and faculty dissatisfaction, the Library of Richard Stockton College of New Jersey found a successful approach to maintaining a balanced collection while making the necessary cuts to stay within its budget. With a combination of cost, usage, and overlap analysis data, the Library was able to justify its cost-cutting measures and gain the support of faculty and other patrons.
How can a small but growing college make the tough decisions necessary to stay within its budget without angering its faculty? Two librarians from Richard Stockton College of New Jersey described how their library, after several attempts, finally arrived at an approach that seems to work well.
Mary Ann Trail, Public Services Librarian and Administrator of the Library's Education Program, provided an overview of the institution and its library. Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, which currently enrolls about 7,000 undergraduate and 1,000 graduate students, began in the 1970s as a liberal arts school with a strongly democratic philosophy. Faculty requests had always played a large role in library collection development decisions, mainly through the school's Library Advisory Committee. Generally, the departments with the loudest voices and the largest number of demands got what they wanted. This resulted in a collection that was clearly unbalanced, but as long as there was enough money in the budget to cover all the requests, there was little motivation to address the situation.
As demand for electronic journals increased, it became clear that something had to change. In 1990, the library had 1,401 print and 480 microform subscriptions costing about $150,000; today, its remaining 468 print subscriptions alone cost more than $227,000, and the library has added 41,000 electronic journal titles to them. As the college grew during the 1990s, adding graduate degrees and new programs in the health professions, the library's annual 5 percent increase for collections was discontinued, and its periodicals budget actually declined. The practice of approving all requests simply could not continue.
The year 2000 brought a new director to the library, who was determined to address the imbalance in the collection and strongly believed that collection decisions should be data-driven. He reallocated the periodicals budget among the various departments and instituted a “horse-trading” system, in which any new title requests had to be accompanied by an equivalent amount in cancellations.
In the same year, the college switched from a faculty assembly, in which every faculty member had a vote, to the more representative system of a faculty senate. This change helped to minimize the immediate outcry from departments suddenly forced to limit their demands, but the faculty were soon making use of their new college-wide e-mail distribution system to voice their unhappiness with cuts in their departments' collections. Within a few years, the faculty revolted, collectively responding to news of proposed cancellations with a flood of angry e-mails and a refusal to tolerate any further cuts.
In 2005, the Library Director introduced a new system of allocating funding among the departments that considered the number of students, the average cost of journals in the subject area, and the number of Science Direct titles in the program. Recalculating the numbers each year was a cumbersome process, and even though usage statistics had been compiled for many years, the new system did not include usage data. As a result, some departments with fairly low journal usage, such as math, gained funding, while the much smaller nursing department with heavier journal usage was cut back so severely that it nearly lost its accreditation.
By 2009, projecting an increase of 8 to 10 percent in subscription costs, the library was faced with a $29,000 shortfall in the periodicals budget for the coming year. The Director was ready to try something new, and turned to Kerry Chang-FitzGibbon, the college's Serials Librarian for 22 years. The project, as Chang-FitzGibbon saw it, was as follows:
| • | To address the budget deficit by cancelling print subscriptions | ||||
| • | To verify the availability of electronic access in the library's subscribed databases | ||||
| • | To proactively calm the faculty | ||||
| • | To prove to the faculty that there would be no loss of access resulting from print cancellations | ||||
| • | To ensure the availability of stable online access | ||||
| • | To deal with restrictions on online access, such as embargoes or moving walls | ||||
Since the library already used Serials Solutions to manage its periodicals, including print journals, Chang-FitzGibbon began by running the program's overlap analysis report to get a general picture of how many print titles were also represented in the library's electronic databases.
At that time, the library subscribed to 69 online databases (the number has since risen to 92). Using Serials Solutions, Chang-FitzGibbon created a list of titles included in each of the databases, including dates of coverage, and then merged the information into a spreadsheet and sorted it alphabetically by title. Then she pared down the spreadsheet to include only titles with print holdings, highlighting the titles with current print subscriptions. See for an indication of overlap between print and online holdings.
FIGURE 1 Spreadsheet indicating overlap between print and online holdings.
For each remaining title, Chang-FitzGibbon double-checked the accuracy of the coverage information provided by Serials Solutions. She added columns for the print subscription and bindery costs, the program in which the journal was allocated, the past three years of print and electronic usage statistics, and restrictions such as embargoes and moving walls. She also noted any titles for which online access could not be obtained without a print subscription.
For her print cancellation recommendations to the Director and the Library Advisory committee, Chang-FitzGibbon considered anything with less than ten print uses in the past three years for which the electronic access was unrestricted, stable, and reliable. The committee's final cancellation list of 77 print titles mostly adhered to those standards, saving the library $29,444 in subscription and bindery costs. The recommendations, with supporting data, were provided to the faculty earlier than usual, which helped to make them feel a part of the process. This time, the library made a point of avoiding words such as “cutting” or “cancellation,” instead using the more positive phrase “switching formats.” Faced with the data documenting the low usage of print journals and the availability of online access, the faculty's response was supportive.
There were several questions and comments from the audience. An audience member asked what the library would do if (despite the perceived reliability of access) a cancelled print title was dropped from a database collection without warning. Chang-FitzGibbon responded that, if the faculty complained, the subscription would be reinstated at once using money from the monograph budget. Asked if she had made any comparison of the format or appearance of the electronic versions with the print versions, Chang-FitzGibbon said that she had indeed looked at that aspect, but that it was important mainly in the art department, whose faculty insisted on print versions anyway. Chang-FitzGibbon was also asked how the library determined print usage; she said that it was done manually upon re-shelving, the method she had instituted when she first arrived at Richard Stockton College in 1989. Trail commented that many faculty were skeptical about the accuracy of this method, and did not believe that patrons would leave journal issues on tables, rather than re-shelving them themselves. But since the library had signs everywhere asking patrons not to re-shelve their own journals, any patrons who did so should have realized that they were affecting their own usage statistics. The Library Director supported the use of this method, since it gave at least some indication of print usage.
To an audience member wondering about the timing of the renewal process, Chang-FitzGibbon responded that the faculty are asked for input by May of each year, before they leave for their summer break, and that her report for the 2012 renewals was already completed and sent to the director by the end of May 2011. One audience member commented that when he looked at converting print subscriptions to online-only, he was struck by the wide variation in pricing plans, with some conversions yielding significant savings for e-only versions while others even cost more than print. The presenters agreed with this observation.