Email: Library Collections and Budget Statement

December 14, 2020 By USF Health Libraries

Message was sent by USF Health Libraries to their stakeholders.

Managing library resources for the University of South Florida within the recent budget constraints due to the COVID pandemic requires actions by the academic USF Libraries and the USF Health Libraries. This is our update on how the USF Libraries and the USF Health Libraries are addressing this year’s budget challenges and how we can continue to support the research and instruction conducted at USF.

The USF Libraries (Tampa Campus Library, Poynter Library – St, Petersburg, and Library Services – Sarasota) have posted their “Revisioning Collection Management,” plan that details the steps they are taking to ensure their “commitment to providing USF faculty and students with access to the content they need for research and instruction” (https://lib.usf.edu/collections-and-discovery/revisioning/).

The USF Health Libraries, composed of the Shimberg Health Science Library and the Florida Blue Health Knowledge Exchange, are committed to providing resources to support USF Health education, research, scholarship, and the accreditation of our colleges and programs.

With the steadfast support of our USF Health Leadership, the USF Health Libraries is in an excellent position to maintain collections that critically support USF Health’s research and educational activities, while taking the opportunity to re-work our journal subscription packages. In doing so, we hope to free up library budget funds to subscribe to and maintain the most important resources for your work.

We see this time of budget uncertainties as a way to REFRESH our collections to provide stronger support to USF Health programs and priorities in the form of the journals, books, and databases that are most significant to your efforts as students, instructors, researchers, residents, and administrators.

Our evidence-based plan is simple:

  1. ASSESS: We will enhance our current data-driven decision making for collections renewals and acquisitions including the use of a combination of third-party resources that will allow us to model and forecast our collections decisions for so-called “big deal” (i.e., major publishing houses)  packages. These data will include faculty citations, faculty authorship, annual usage, backfiles usage, perpetual access, open access, interlibrary loan costs (including copyright costs), full-text denials, and prices.
  2. ASK: We will build journal subscription models to obtain the most cost-effective journal subscription plans for our highest-cost journal packages (e.g., Springer/Nature, Sage, Wiley, and Elsevier). This will allow us to keep or reacquire the individual journals in those packages that are the most used and most important to USF Health, while freeing up funds to obtain other needed collection resources that support new teaching and research initiatives of our faculty members.
  3. ACQUIRE: We will gather input on new titles and resources from our liaison librarians and from USF Health faculty members to use with our forecasting and decision-making models.
  4. APPRAISE: We will carefully review and conduct a final analysis of all data collected and select resources for renewal, cancellation, and acquisition.
  5. APPLY: We will negotiate with our vendors for fair deals for selected titles and subscribe or purchase accordingly. We will then communicate our refreshed collections with all of you.
  6. EVALUATE: We will apply continuous-quality improvement methods to collect and analyze the data following our evidence-based methodology. This process will ensure we are providing the most cost-effective, critical resources aligned with the goals and mission of USF Health and the USF Health Libraries.

Our promise to you: We will remain flexible and open in our decision making in response to our ever-changing environment and the individual and programmatic needs of our students, faculty, researchers, residents, and administrators. As always, interlibrary loan services will be available to obtain requested full-text articles we may not have access to in our collections.

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Email sent from USF Health Libraries to its stakeholders, 12/14/2020

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