Methods Adopted to Tackle Increasing Cost of Information for Libraries

Abstract

Research, particularly in the engineering and science disciplines, benefits from being able to scan comprehensively the content of journals, and then access the full text of the articles. Access to full papers is expensive but ‘just-in-time’ access satisfies researchers’ needs and keeps costs down as compared to ‘just-in-case’ subscriptions. New strategies with changed publishing and librarian attitudes are required if a library is to improve its capability to meet the information needs of the academic community effectively within budget. Fortunately there are a number of ways to give researchers access to authoritative scholarly quality information at much reduced, or even no cost. A number of these strategies have been successful adopted in our University and hope it can be useful to other libraries.