Message was sent by Carol Ann Davis, Associate Dean, Collections & Discovery, USF Libraries, to all USF Libraries faculty and staff.
Journals:
First, the good news: We have been reassured by our sales reps for the large journal publishers that we are not being cut off on Jan. 1 while we renegotiate the configuration of our title lists. Notes on specific packages:
- Elsevier, Cambridge, and Wiley are continuing multi-year agreements at the state level through 2021.
- Wiley will be removing about 150 or so titles (that are low-use state-wide) from the agreement in order to give us a much-needed discount this year.
- Taylor & Francis has offered to bridge us this year for content while the colleges determine what academic programs are continuing. There will be little to no content loss for 2021
- Sage, Oxford, and Springer/Nature are still under negotiation
On the smaller packages, we have unbundled a few of them in order to save money this year (Institute of Physics, American Physical Society, Optical Society of America, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics). Others are still being reviewed.
We also have several hundred individual journal subscriptions that we’ve been trying to evaluate along the way. This week, we’ve been madly going through looking at usage reports from the smaller publishers to determine content to keep or cancel. We’ve sent information to EBSCO on about half of these, but we have a ways to go there.
So that brings me to the bad news: For some of the smaller packages and titles, we will likely lose access on January 1. Given the time crunch, we have not updated the link resolver and catalog record on those yet; we will be doing that the first week of January when we return. I have a list now of what does NOT have perpetual access once it expires, so those will be top priority to evaluate and renew or deactivate/remove records when we return. Even titles with perpetual access will need the dates updated, because there are often years of access that we get with a subscription in addition to the “owned” content from the years we subscribed. For those that are definitely renewing, our EBSCO rep has a list to work through when she is back in the office on Monday, Dec. 28.
Ebooks:
We are holding on the 2021 Springer ebook package purchase. What we have, we own; Springer ebooks are not an EBA program, though it does include some complimentary content. Our rep assures us that we own most of that, too, as part of our annual purchases, but we don’t have written confirmation of that. We will be spot-checking those titles the first week of January to make sure there are no surprises.
We are also holding on renewing the Wiley EBA program for ebooks until we have a better sense of the budget. Laura is making final purchase selections for this year’s contract and has asked Wiley to grace us until Jan. 15th so that we can update catalog records. We don’t have a final answer on that yet, so fingers crossed.
Databases and other content:
More good news here: I think we actually got through evaluating everything with a December 31 expiration date.
Revisioning Collection Management pages:
We hit a snag on updating the Cancellations Table yesterday. We had so much content to add that we hit a character limit in LibGuides. We are going to move this to WordPress during the first week of January so that we can get the table functionality back. Right now, the page has a static image of the table with a .pdf and Excel option to download. I just realized late last night that the image is arranged alphabetically, not by expiration date first, so there are old cancellations mixed in the alphabetic list. The .pdf and Excel files are now arranged by date, then by title of resource.