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Library Budget and Cancellations

Dealing with UNM budget reductions

Impacts on UNM library content

Since academic year 2015-2016 the University Libraries has canceled over 450 subscription resources. The number of books and ebooks purchased annually is now half what it was five years ago.

 

 

Cancellation Considerations

The UNM Libraries strives to meet the information needs of its students and faculty and recognize that any cancellations will impact our users.  With continually decreasing budgets we consider the following when deciding what content to maintain or cancel:

  • Is it part of one of our strategic collections (Latin American, Native American, New Mexico and the Southwest)? 
    • Do not cancel or reduce funding unless as a last resort.
  • Is it part of a publisher or vendor multi-year deal, consisting of high impact and heavily used journal titles (including Big Deals with Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Oxford)?
    • Renegotiate better terms upon contract expiration.
    • Consider contract cancelation if acceptable terms cannot be reached or in the case of financial exigency.
    • Engage in significant review of use, coverage, budget impact, etc. before renegotiating any renewal.
    • Engage with the disciplinary departments impacted by cancellations as appropriate.
  • Is a title available full-text from more than source - such as in aggregate databases?
    • If available from an aggregate database consider cancelling subscription to the journal title. We will lose perpetual access to the journal title but will have access as long as the vendor has an agreement with the publisher to include it in their database.
  • Does the title have a high cost per use?
    • We recognize that there are disciplinary differences but on an average we evaluate anything that costs more than $10/use to see if alternate methods of access are available or if we need to cancel a title.
    • Engage with the disciplinary departments impacted by cancellations as appropriate.
  • Is it cheaper to use Inter Library Loan (ILL) to get the article or book (based on usage data)?
    • Use ILL data annually to analyze what we do not have that our users request and, depending on the cost of obtaining a title either from another library or from article services such as Reprints Desk or Copyright Clearance Center, we may either continue to get articles through ILL or we may add a journal title to our list of subscriptions.