On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 8:41 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@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@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?