601 South College Road, Wilmington, NC 28403-5616 910-962-7641

MEMORANDUM

TO: UNCW Administrators and Faculty

FROM: Sue Cody, Interim University Librarian

SUBJECT: Serials Review Project

DATE: August 31, 2009

We have all been reeling from the state budget cuts and the continued uncertainty in the economic condition of North Carolina and the global economy. It is hitting home in a variety of ways, including extraordinary reductions in the Randall Library materials budget.

The library is consulting various constituencies, including the Faculty Senate Library Committee, Academic Department Chairs and Library Representatives, and the UNCW community at large for input in how the library can reduce its serials budget by $200,000. Serials (print and electronic journals, bibliographic and full-text databases, and other standing orders) have risen in cost at a greater rate than general inflation. Library Journal reported in its annual review of periodical prices that since 2005 serials prices have risen between 31-58%, depending upon discipline. Our primary serials vendor, Ebsco, had estimated our inflation this year to be between 8-9%, or $145,560-$163,755. The General Assembly typically includes an amount in the state budget to address library materials inflation, but it was eliminated for the next biennium. In other words, next year will be as bad, or worse, than this year.

Over the last few years, UNCW has benefitted from ejournal package deals entered into as part of the Carolina Consortium, a group of academic libraries in North and South Carolina. These negotiated prices have resulted in significant discounts. These packages of journals tend to be interdisciplinary in content, so making decisions about which of them must be cancelled will be more complex than in past serials review projects.

The Randall Library Serials Task Force will guide the review and make the final decisions on what must be cancelled, but input from our users is crucial to making decisions that reach our goal of cutting $200,000 while protecting as much as possible the access to teaching and research materials needed by students and faculty. We will post news about the serials review project at http://library.uncw.edu/serials/reduction_project_2009_2010 .

We take seriously our role as a high-profile content provider for students, faculty and staff. We encourage you to use our interlibrary loan and document delivery service for materials not in the collection. Your primary contact librarian (see the list at http://library.uncw.edu/web/outreach/contactlibrarians.html) can also help you set up automatic alerts for your favorite journals through the Ingenta Table of Contents alert service or other databases we provide.

Thank you for your input in the process. Feel free to contact me ([email protected]), Arlene Hanerfeld, Associate University Librarian for Technical Services ([email protected]) or Rebecca Kemp, Serials Librarian ([email protected]) with any questions or comments.