[WikiEN-l] Subscription idea

[George Herbert]

On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 8:41 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:

> I comment as a professional academic librarian. I was the cochair of
> princeton's collection development committee on electronic resources
> from the day it started.
>
> The typical budget today for e-resources for a major university is on
> the order of three to six million dollars a year, mainly for science
> journals and databases. The most expensive subscriptions to the works
> of a single publisher can be over one million dollars, and there are
> individual databases in the fifty to one hundred-thousand dollar
> range. A typical budget for a good undergraduate college might be one
> million; it will not have the most expensive journals.
>
> On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 12:11 AM, George Herbert
> <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> > We need to get someone who's more of a professional librarian to look at
> > this and comment.  What are typical university library online reference
> > access budgets like, for example?
> >
> > Phoebe?
>


Thank you, David.

Are those prices proprietary or sensitive, or would it be possible for you
to release a list of what your libraries subscribe to, for discussion and
analysis purposes?

I think the "can we afford $6 million a year" answer is a clear but not
absolute no (with a compelling argument, it's in the range of charitable
donations we could conceivably ask for).

But would for example $100,000, or $500,000, make a significantly useful
amount to work with?

What could we get for that, and what would be missing?


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com