I don’t think there is a standard. At least 100 years ago!
an ARL study was done and they reported that it cost, round trip, for an ARL
interlibrary loan $11 for the borrowing library and $19 for the lending
library. Much has changed since the study – e.g. ILLiad for one, online
journal content, etc. However, for purposes of general comparison, I use $30
per use as my guide for putting the journal on an endangered species list. I don’t
use the OCLC $ figure (which I thought was $1.05) because the pay per use
option is available for 1% of the databases that we might want access to.
Our journal and databases per use costs vary widely from $.05 per use to $61
per use for databases and even more extremes for individual journals. A
colleague and I are doing a paper on this topic at NASIG in June. Pretty much
the choices must be made by discipline and then by journal. But the cost
per use does allow you to compare and rank and I think it is a valuable
statistic. And then the biggest question is – what is a use? The
user checks 6 books out and reads two of them, returns them all – which ones
get counted as read – all of them. A user takes 6 issues of a journal off
the shelf, looks at the TOCs in each one, reads an article in one of them and
leaves them all to be reshelved. How do we count the use – 6 times. A
user searches a database, finds nothing of use in the results, may even repeat
the search (often exactly the same way) and each search is counted as a ‘fruitful’
search. Patron downloads an article and never reads it, but they’ve
searched and downloaded in a handy pdf and we count it as a fruitful
result. They are all equally useless and useful data points.
Pick a number that you feel you can justify to constituents and
then use that number as a benchmark. I’m pretty comfortable with the $30;
then rank the journals based on the cost per use and see what falls above and
below and see if you can justify cancelling those above. Some really pricey
journals might be at $40 per use and still be used 50 xs. You’d spend a
fair amount of money ILLing that journal – but probably still less than
you pay for it.
The one thing this model doesn’t take into account is the
cost of owning the journal. Clearly, there are serious costs by journal for the
print version – check in (repeatedly), claiming, shelving, binding,
shelving, expanding the shelving, paying for it through your annual
subscription. For the online, handling through your EMRS, A-Z lists, catalog
whatever, paying for it etc. Real costs we seldom use when comparing the cost
for ILLing and the cost for owning.
Hope this is helpful.
Linda
Linda
Hulbert, Associate Director
Collection Management and Services
O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library #5004
University of Saint Thomas
2115 Summit Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55105
Phone: (651)
962-5016 Fax: (651)
962-5486 email: lahulbert@stthomas.edu
Casanova:
'Life is the only blessing man possesses, and those who do not live it are
unworthy of it.'
From: SERIALST: Serials
in Libraries Discussion Forum [mailto:SERIALST@list.uvm.edu] On Behalf Of Thompson,Tracey
Sent: Friday, May 07, 2010 1:01 PM
To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
Subject: Re: [SERIALST] Database return on investment
OCLC still has that model up until July 1. The cost per
search is around $.90.
I was surprised by how low everyone’s journal cost per use
is. We just completed a serial review for budget cuts, and our target was
$35 cost per use which is the average cost for an article.
Tracey
Thompson
Acquisitions Librarian/College Asst. Professor
New Mexico State University Library
MSC 3475 PO Box 30006
Las Cruces, NM 88003
Phone: 575-646-8093
Fax: 575-646-7077
Skype: Jenymn
SL: Jenymn Mersand
Email: thomtd@nmsu.edu
From: SERIALST: Serials
in Libraries Discussion Forum [mailto:SERIALST@list.uvm.edu] On Behalf Of Judith
Nagata
Sent: Friday, May 07, 2010 11:09 AM
To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
Subject: Re: [SERIALST] Database return on investment
In the late 1990s some
databases did have a pay per search (e.g. FirstSearch). I cannot remember
how much it cost per search. This model was used by institutions to have access
to a little used database until the deposit account ran out of money. If the
deposit account ran out too early consistently, then the
library could consider switching to a full subscription. I hope someone
else might remember the cost per search and then you could adjust for inflation.
Judith
Judith M. Nagata
Serials/Electronic Resources
Librarian
Harrisburg Area Community
College
Library Central Services
One HACC Dr.
Harrisburg, PA 17110
Ph: 717-780-2535
Fax: 717-780-2462
>>> "Stokes, Judith" <JStokes@RIC.EDU> 5/7/2010 11:58 AM
>>>
Hi
Marilyn,
I
cannot give you a magic number, but I can tell you what our numbers are like.
With journals, cost per download is actually a pretty good measure, so I get
good numbers from our journal packages. I use annual usage against subscription
price and find that my JSTOR and Project Muse packages are around $1 per
download. Other similar packages run as high as $5. My social science journals
run up to $10, and only my STM journals exceed $10. I know a colleague who sets
$20 as the maximum for her renewals.
With
databases, the only consistent measure I can get for all of them is searches,
so I compute cost per search, but the figures come out all crazy amounts, so I
don't report them out, but I do look at them, and the ones I believe to be well-used
and economically priced do tend to come out under 30 cents per search.
Your
figures may be totally different, of course.
Good
luck,
Judith
Judith
E. Stokes
Associate
Professor
Electronic
Resources/Serials Librarian
Rhode
Island College
600
Mount Pleasant Avenue
Providence,
RI 02908-1991
401.456.8165
-----Original
Message-----
From:
SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum [mailto:SERIALST@list.uvm.edu]
On Behalf Of Geller, Marilyn
Sent:
Friday, May 07, 2010 7:41 AM
To:
SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
Subject:
[SERIALST] Database return on investment
I'm
hoping other continuing resources people can help me answer this
question:
What is a good return on investment? Or what's a "good" cost
per
use?
I'm
not asking how to get these numbers; rather I'm wondering what these
numbers
mean once you have them. I recognize that there are a dozen
reasons
for paying for some databases no matter what the cost per use
is.
And I recognize that cost per use doesn't necessarily mean that a
database
was used "well". I also recognize that "use" can have
a
variety
of meanings.
But
right now, I need to be able to say simply how much certain
databases
cost per each use and whether that's a good indicator or a bad
one.
Does anyone have that magic (possibly meaningless!) number?
Thanks,
Marilyn
Geller
Collection
Management Librarian
Lesley
University Library
29
Everett Street
Cambridge,
MA 02138
Email:
mgeller@lesley.edu
Phone:
617-349-8859