Potential Cancellations for 2004/2005

The UAMS Library’s current base budget will be approximately $265,000 short of covering the projected 2005 cost for current databases, journals and book purchases. There are two major reasons for the shortfall:

• the rising cost of journals and
• the lack of one-time money, which was used the past three years in lieu of base budget increases sufficient to pay the increased journal costs.

Journal costs rise at an average of 10% per year, which means that the Library’s budget needed to increase about $100,000 per year to cover the increased cost.

The Library did not receive the budget increase requested for 2004/2005. As a result the Library has submitted a first list of potential journal and database subscription cancellations to the Library Advisory Committee. Members of this Committee, who represent each of the colleges, have been asked to distribute these lists to their faculty for reactions to the cancellations. Decisions on these and further cancellations will be made in the next three months.

Included in the cancellation list are several Ovid journal collections.

• The Library plans to decrease the online journals that we currently buy through Ovid because many of them are duplicated in other subscriptions.
• When these core journals are not available elsewhere we will buy them individually. For example, we will purchase online access to the 10 American Medical Association journals directly from AMA and have now purchased Science directly from AAAS.

Besides saving the Library some money, this change will also provide UAMS site-wide and remote unlimited access to all the AMA journals and immediate access to the issues of Science. Currently our online access to Science through Ovid is delayed by 3 months. The other journals in the cancelled Ovid journal collections will still be available to UAMS through the Library’s publisher subscriptions.

Many faculty members have already responded concerning items on the cancellation list. Additional items have been added to the list. These are marked by **. If you see items included on the cancellation list that are vital to your field, please send your rationale for continuing a subscription to: Mary Hawks, hawksmarys@uams.edu.

Download Potential Cancellation List 2004/2005 (MS Excel File)

Mary Hawks,
Collection Management Librarian