Until 2005, our university library subscribed Project Muse. This year,
as the subscription fee goes up, I was asked to have the overlap
analyses with all our other databases about the Muse titles. The result
is: more than 80% of Muse titles are redundant with the other databases
we have. Only about less than 40 titles in Muse are unique. (18 Duke
titles which are also unique have been already withdrawn from Muse). At
last, our library decided not to subscribe Project Muse starting 2006.

But after we stop the subscription, we got phone calls from professors
who are used to Muse for retrieve some articles. Even though I some
times can find the articles for them by using ProQuest, or Ebsco, or
some other databases, this makes me rethink whether it is a correct
decision to quit Project Muse. And another problem is that when users
tried to get articles from a title in Jstor, they were referred to Muse.
So, I have to raise the question for our library whether we should pick
it up again or not.

I just want to hear from the other Serials Librarians: what do you think
about Project Muse? And what is your library's policy for deselect
databases with the impact of budget?

Thank you in advice for sharing the information with me.

Tian X. Zhang

Serials Librarian
St. John's University Library
8000 Utopia Parkway
Queens, NY 11439