Hi Mark,

Have you explored the online package subscriptions?  We found the online
package to all titles to be about the same amount of money we were
paying for a few titles.  We subscribe to the online package through our
consortium (we subscribed through GWLA and now through SCELC).  We
canceled all our print subscriptions.  Faculty had to agree.  While they
saw the benefits, it was difficult for them to give up browsing the
print.  So, to ease the pain, we made an online browsing collection for
them.
http://library.stmarys-ca.edu/subjects/chemistry/periodicals.html

Use skyrocketed.  And, now we can justify the expenditure.

...Linda

Linda Wobbe/ Head, Collection Management/ Saint Mary's College Library/
PO Box 4290/ 1928 Saint Mary's Road/ Moraga, CA 94575-4290/
ph(925)631-4232; fx(925)376-6097

On 1/21/11 11:08 AM, Mark Ferguson wrote:
> Has anybody else been struggling trying to figure out what to do about
> their American Chemical Society journal subscriptions?  We had been
> subscribed to nine titles costing us around $18,000 p/yr, already some
> of our costliest titles.  Also the titles are underutilized; we
> maintain our subscriptions to them  at the Chemestry department's
> request to fulfill requirements for accredation (and American Chemical
> Society is the accrediting body, do I sense a conflict of interest here?).
> Generally it seems that most of the subscription charges for our
> periodicals have risen only modestly, if at all,  for 2011, due in
> part to low inflation and deminished library funding for
> subscriptions, as library budgets are shrinking.  This however is not
> the case with our Amdrican Chemical Society subscriptions. The
> subscription charges for these same 9 titles have gone up from $18,000
> to $23,000 per year for 2011.  The only thing my Rep can offer is a
> deal to provide more ACS journal subscriptions at a slightly higher
> rate, which of course does not address the problem that we cannot
> afford the subscriptions we currently have with ACS, let alone any
> additional costs.
> We have canceled our subscriptions to about a third of the titles we
> subscribed to in the previous year to keep costs under control.  Has
> anyone faced these same issues?  What else have people done to resolve
> this problem?  I would be very interested to hear what other kinds of
> stategies serials department directors have come up with in the face
> of these rising costs.
> Mark Ferguson
> Periodicals Librarian, College of Saint Elizabeth