---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 09:46:36 -0700
From: Jennifer Sweeney <jksweeney@UCDAVIS.EDU>
Subject: Re: Cost per title of print journals versus journals in
      electronic da tabases... (Peter Picerno)

I get in trouble regularly for oversimplifying things so I can relate to
Buddy's questions.  A couple of thoughts to add to Peter's:

Maintaining a print collection and providing access to an electronic
resource are not equivalent in terms of cost or content, and never will
be.   Comparing them this way does not provide an accurate picture of the
effects on our users... Electronic features such as linking via CrossRef,
multimedia, and so on have made e-journals invaluable to researchers, and
so we should provide them.  All this aside, it's still a fact that neither
e-journals nor full-text databases are a true replacement for print, no
matter how much we want them to be.  It's a difficult tradeoff; what will
best serve your users' needs given a budget of x?

Jennifer Sweeney
Library Analyst
UC Davis

At 09:07 AM 10/20/2000 -0400, you wrote:
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 08:12:54 -0500
>From: Peter Picerno <ppicerno@choctaw.astate.edu>
>Subject: Re: Cost per title of print journals versus journals in
>       electronic da tabases... (Buddy Pennington)
>
>Good point, Buddy, but there are a few things you need to consider, such as
>the more 'rarefied' titles (for lack of a better word - perhaps
>'specialized' would be better) which are part of every subject area ...
>where there is any sort of research going on in an institution there will be
>demand for titles which are not usually part of the bundled packages which
>aggregators offer, and to acquire such titles in a more cost-effective
>fashion sometimes means rather pricy solutions (we've just gone with Ovid
>for some medical journals). What you state may be true for general
>collections of core-type journals, but I would imagine that if most of us
>were to do a title-by-title comparison between our single-subscription
>titles and those in the bundles, we would not find a great amount of overlap
>(all other problems like archiving, etc. aside). Nonetheless, it would be an
>interesting comparison to make.
>
>Peter Picerno

Jennifer Sweeney
Library Analyst
Shields Library
University of California
Davis, CA 95616

voice (530) 752-5819
fax (530) 752-6899
jksweeney@ucdavis.edu