MU MU Libraries

Update on Collections Cuts

Thank you for your input in the review of some of our low usage journals this spring.

  • 992 people participated in the review.
  • 352 of those users were from Health Sciences disciplines.
  • We received feedback on all 600+ journals on the list, and this information will be very useful to have in the upcoming journal package  negotiations.
  • You can view the responses here.

It will be some time before we know how much this review will help to address what now appears will be a $1,200,000 shortfall in the collections budget.

Since this shortfall represents 20% of the collection budget for the campus libraries, we have been asked  to prepare for a 20% cut across all of our collections.

That will amount to around $77,000 for the Health Sciences Library. 

Sadly, most of this will have to come from our journal subscriptions, since we had already pared back our book spending in 2011 when we started purchasing books only on demand.

We will do our best to minimize the impact of these cuts, but they will be painful because they are so deep. In many cases, we will have to settle for access rather than ownership of needed material – hardly a sound or sustainable strategy for building or maintaining a research library collection.