Cost Minimization of Library Electronic Subscriptions

Abstract

Many libraries, particularly those at Universities in developing countries, are facing challenging financial times. This has led to the need for budget cuts and more efficient management of limited resources. One of the major costs of an academic library are the fees paid for subscriptions to electronic journals, databases, conference proceedings and for costs associated with downloads of individual papers if there is no subscription to the corresponding resource. Typically the decision as to whether or not a particular subscription is acquired is done based on faculty member requests, information about the resource (such as cost) and policies of the library. However, with the availability of a wide range of collected statistics, (number of downloads, impact factors, etc.) one can make better informed decisions. In this paper we provide a decision support system in which we define a metric for the value obtained per access to a resource and then determine the minimum budget required to achieve a given total value of this metric.