USING A VALUATIVE INSTRUMENT FOR DECISION-MAKING IN THE CANCELLATION OF SCIENCE JOURNALS IN A UNIVERSITY SETTING

Academic libraries are being forced to make difficult decisions regard ing journal collections due to rapidly increasing costs and shrinking budgets. Nowhere is this problem more acute than in the sciences where it is not unheard of for an entire departmental budget to be dedicate d entirely to serials. The process for title elimination at a universi ty usually involves invited input from faculty members. Typically, the decision-making process consists of faculty reacting to a list of tit les provided to them by the library. Often little valuative informatio n is available to assist in the decision, forcing faculty to make sele ctions based on their recollections of the value of the titles. At the University of Maryland at College Park Libraries, a valuative instrum ent is being developed to allow science librarians to identify titles which appear to be likely candidates for cancellation based on a list of attributes including cost (per year, per issue, per page), publishe r type (commercial or society), value-added features (peer review), an d citedness (ISI impact factor). The instrument, developed with facult y input, will provide science librarians and faculty with data to assi st in the difficult task of collection reduction. This paper describes the instrument and the results of a pilot test in which the instrumen t was used to select candidate titles for cancellation from a sample o f science journals.